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APPLETONS' POPULAR LIBRARY 

OF THE BEST AUTHORS. 



-«-•-•- 



A JOUENAL OF SUMMEE TIME IN 
THE COUNTEY. 



I find one book of observations, begun in tlie year 1646, wherein I have 
noted many nseful things, having the word eternity at the top of many 
pages, by the thought of which I was quickened to spend my timvi well. 
It Is a great comfort to me now, in my old age, to find that I was so diligent 
in my youth ; — for in those books I have noted how I spent my time. 

Bishop Patrick, Autobiography, 

There is no saying shocks me so mnch as that which I hear very 
often : — That a man does not know how to pass his time. 'Twould have 
been ill spoken by Methusalem in the nine hundred and sixty -ninth year of 
his life. . . . But if any man be so unlearned as to want entertainment of the 
little intervals of accidental solitude which frequently occur in almost all 
conditions, it is truly a great shame both to his parents and himself. For a 
very small portion of any ingenious art will stop up all those gaps of our 
time, either music^ or painting, or history, or gardening, or twenty other 
things, will do it usefully and pleasantly. 

Cowley, Of Solitude, 

Friends, books, a garden, and perhaps his pen, 
Delightful industry enjoyed at home. 
And Nature in her cultivated trim, 
Dress'd to his taste, inviting him abroad. 

CowPER, Ta&Jc B. III. 



A JOUENAL 



OF 



SUMMER TIME 



IN 



THE COUNTRY. 



BY THE 



REV. ROBERT ARTS WILLMOTT, 

INCUMBENT OF BEAR WOOD, BERKS; 
AUTHOR OF "JEREMY TAYLOR, A BIOGRAPHY." 



NEW-YORK : 
D. APPLETOISr & COMPANY, 200 BROADWAY. 

M.DCCC.LII. 



tC •:; 



,W-^« ^"S 



W. L. Sboemftker 
I t '06 



...c» 









TO 

HIS SISTERS, 

WITH DEEPEST LOVE AND THANKFULNESS, 

THIS 

JOrENAL OF SUMMER TIME 

BY THE AUTHOR. 



JOURNAL 

OF 

SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 



May 1st. — Gray always sketched upon the spot 
the general features of a landscape, and advised his 
friends to do the same. " You have nothing," he 
wrote to one, " but to transcribe your little red 
books, if they are not rubbed out ; for I conclude 
you have not trusted anything to memory, which is 
ten times worse than a lead pencil." The wish is 
felt by every reader, that Gray had given us more 
of his own diaries ; or had composed them on a dif- 
ferent principle. His stories of home-travel, com- 
municated to Dr. Wharton, are incomparable. But, 
for the most part, he hid his sweet and learned 
thoughts in his own bosom. Golden days in the 
country were lost in critical inquiries respecting in- 
sects and plants ; or in talk with fishermen about 
uncertain fins and scales, 



8 JOURNAL OF 



Johnson, in his Scottish tour, uses an awful word 
to express the blending and decay of objects in the 
mind : — '• Many particular features and discrimina- 
tions are confused and conglobated into one gross 
and general idea." The landscape of thought is not 
less shifting and changeable than that of nature. 
Both may be fixed or revived. A few scratches — a 
word of commentary or abridgment — will often 
serve to raise a remembrance of the beauty they 
represent, and even to recall the colouring and light 
of the original view or description. An early He- 
brew custom appears to be the journal in an alle- 
gory. After the destruction of Jerusalem, when a 
Jew had passed the examination of his teacher, he 
took a raised seat, and a writing-tablet was put before 
him, to signify that he ought to record his acquisi- 
tions, and not suffer them to fade away unimproved. 

In the same spirit, Sir Thomas Bodley wrote to 
Bacon : " Strain your wits and industry soundly, to 
instruct yourself in all things between heaven and 
earth, which may tend to virtue, and wisdom, and 
honour; and let all these riches be treasured up, not 
only in your memory, where time may ripen your 
stock, but rather in good writings and books of ac- 
count, which will keep them safe for your use here- 
after." I have not forgotten Swift's satiric lesson 
to a young author, how, with an empty head and full 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 9 

common-place book, he might boldly start up a giant 
of erudition and capacity, encyclopaedic and un- 
fathomable. A book of thoughts, not extracts, is 
proposed. And it is pleasant to recognize the prac- 
tice in scholars of ancient days : " Sometimes I 
hunt," said Pliny, '' but even then I carry with me 
a pocket-book, that while my servants are busied in 
disposing the nets and other matters, I may be em- 
ployed in something that may be useful to me in 
my studies ; and that, if I miss my game, I may at 
least bring home some of my thoughts with me, and 
not undergo the mortification of having caught no- 
thing." Beethoven walked in the streets of Vienna 
with his tablet in his hand. 

The sudden gushes of fancy are often the bright- 
est. Not that the common-places are to be neglect- 
ed : they form an important episode in the narra- 
tive of intellectual progress. If a book be a har- 
vest-field, there must be a gathering of sheaves into 
the garner. Paradise Lost and the Transfigura- 
tion grew out of the gleanings of memory. The 
collections of a morning walk become the memo- 
randa of the painter. Gainsborough formed land- 
scape models upon his table ; broken stones, herbs, 
and fragments of glass expanded into rocks, trees, 
and water. 

Few men of genius have taken the trouble of 



10 JOURNAL OF 



recording their feelings or studies. One or two pre- 
cious legacies have perished by accident or design. 
But when the full light is wanting, an unexpected 
illumination frequently breaks over a character, from 
a passage in the published works of the author. A 
page of the journal is broken up, and melted into 
the poem, or essay. Shakspere's sonnets are a chap- 
ter of autobiography, although unreadable till criti- 
cism finds the key. Raffaelle's drawings were his 
diary ; Shenstone's garden, his confessions. Cow- 
per's letters and Wordsworth's poetry reflect the 
features of their writers, as face answers to face in 
water. 

The notion of a journal implies variety. Gray 
confessed that his reading ranged from Pausanias to 
Pindar ; mixing Aristotle and Ovid, like bread with 
cheese. He might have sheltered himself under a 
noble example. Lord Bacon considered it neces- 
sary to contract and dilate the mind's eyesight; 
regarding the interchange of splendour and gloom 
as essential to the health of the organ. The reader 
may test the rule by trying it on his natural eyes. 
In a gorgeous summer day, let him come suddenly 
from a thick screen of branches, turning his face 
towards the sun, and then to the grass. Every blade 
will be reddened, as if a fairy procession had gone 



SUMMEPc TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 11 

by. The colour is not in the grass, but in the eye ; 
as that contracts, the glare vanishes. 

Subject the mental sight to a similar experiment. 
After wandering in the dim recesses of history or 
metaphysics, let the inward eye be lifted to the 
broad, central, glowing orbs of Shakspere, Milton, 
or Hooker, and immediately cast down upon the 
common surface of daily life. Objects become hazy 
and discoloured ; the dilation of the nerve of thought 
dazzles and bewilders the vision. It is wise, there- 
fore, to familiarize the seeing faculty of the under-* 
standing to different degrees of lustre. Sunshine 
and twilight should temper one another. Despise 
nothing. After Plato take up Reid; closing Dante, 
glance at Warton ; from Titian walk away to K. du 
Jardin. The student is like the floating honey- 
gatherers of Piedmont and France — 

Careless his course, yet not without design. 

So through the vales of LoirS the bee-hives glide, 

The light raft dropping with the silent tide. 

If a letter be conversation upon paper, a journal 
is a dialogue between the writer and his memory. 
Now he grows red with Horace, scolding the inn- 
keeper because the bad water had taken away his 
appetite ; and before the strife of tongues has sub- 
sided, he sits down with Shakspere. under a chest- 



12 JOURNAL OP 



nut-tree in Sir Thomas Lucy's park. Thoughts 
must ever be the swiftest travellers, and sighs are 
not the only things wafted "from Indus to the Pole" 
in a moment. Most people are conscious sometimes 
of strange and beautiful fancies swimming before 
their eyes : — the pen is the wand to arrest, and the 
journal the mirror to detain and fix them. The 
mind is visited with certain seasons of brightness^ 
remote events and faded images are recovered with 
striking distinctness, in sudden flashes and irradia- 
tions of memory ; just, to borrow a very striking 
illustration, as the sombre features and minute ob- 
jects of a distant ridge of hills become visible in the 
strong gleams of sun, which fall on them for an in- 
stant, and then vanish into darkness. My own jour- 
nal affords a faint impression of the advantages and 
charms of which that form of writing is susceptible. 
But the instrument itself is not affected by the faults 
of the exhibitor. We are not to deny the transpa- 
rency of a glass, because the face which it reflects be 
plain or uninteresting. Let the student make the 
attempt, and he may be able to apply to himself and 
his friends the graceful recollection of Pope in his 
epistle to Jervas : 

How oft in pleasing tasks we wear the day, 
While summer suns roll unperceived away. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 13 

May 2nd. — At length, tlie weather begins to 
soften ; there is something of '^ a vernal tone" in 
the wind among the fir-trees. The time of green 
leaves is come again ; every moment the day grows 
lovelier — warm, cool, sunshiny, cloudy. The year's 
contraries melt into each other, with a spirit of 
beauty and bloom shedding itself over and through- 
out all, and subduing everything to itself Thom- 
son chose such sweet airs and purple lights to bathe 
his Castle of Indolence, — 

— a season atween June and May, 
Half prankt with spring, with summer half imbrown'd. 

It is delicious now to creep through the green 
trees, and along the scented hedges, 

Where blows the woodbine faintly streaked with red, 

until you steal on the leafy haunt of the woodlark. 

There is love in this idleness. I know that for- 
mal John Wesley put a brand on it : " never be un- 
employed, never be triflingly employed, never while 
away time." Such an admonition might be expected 
from one of whom Johnson left this character : 
" John Wesley's conversation is good, but he is 
never at leisure ; he is always obliged to go at a 
certain hour." When Lord CoUingwood said that 
a young person should not be allowed to have two 



14 JOURNAL OF 



books at tlie same time, he fell into a similar error 
of judgment. Variety is the bloom of life ; sheep 
soon loathe the sweetest grass in the same field. 
The blackbird, that pipes in the warm leaves before 
my w^indow, is a witness against the preacher and 
the admiral. He tired of the lime-shadOj and is fin- 
ishing his song on an apple-branch, that swings him 
further into the sun. He wanted a change. 

Then what is whiling away time ? When Watt 
sat in the chimney-corner, observing the water force 
up the cover of ,the sauce -pan, he aroused the anger 
©f his relations ; but he was discovering the steam- 
e'iigine. Sir Walter Scott, walking one day by the 
banks of the Yarrow, found Mungo Park, the tra- 
veller, earnestly employed in casting stones into the 
stream, and watching the bubbles that followed their 
descent. '* Park, what is it that engages your atten- 
tion?" asked Sir Walter. "I was thinking how 
often I had thus tried to sound the rivers in Africa, 
by calculating the time that elapsed before the bub- 
bles rose to the surface." " Then," said Scott, " I 
know that you think of returning to Africa." '' I 
do, indeed," was the reply; " but it is yet a secret." 
Such is the idleness of genius. But people for the 
last eighteen hundred years have been finding fault 
with it. 

The uncle of Pliny reproved him for walking; 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 15 

lie declared it to be time lost. How mucli truer 
was the confession of Warburton to his friend Hard: 
" It would have been the greatest pleasure to have 
dropped upon you at Newark. I could have led you 
through delicious walks, and picked 'off for your 
amusement in our rambles a thousand notions, which 
I hung upon every thorn as I passed, thirty years 
ago." They whom the world calls idle, are often 
doing the most. In villages and bye-lanes, open 
eyes are always learning. A garden, a wood, even a 
pool of water, encloses a whole library of knowledge, 
waiting only to be read — everlasting types, which 
Nature, in her great printing-press, never breaks up. 
And surely he is happy who is thus taught ; for no 
man can afford to be really unemployed. The tree, 
it has been said, may lose its verdure ; the sun need 
not count its rays ; because the sap will strike out 
new foliage, and another night refills the treasury of 
day. But the thinking faculty does not suffer waste. 
The most saving and thrifty use of it will only make 
it sufficient for our absolute necessities. 

Pascal remarks, that if a man examine his 
thoughts, he finds them to be occupied with what is, 
or is to be. The past and present are paths to the 
future. Aiiisi^ nous ne vivons jamais ; oiuds nous 
espcro7is de vivre. A thought embodying the famous 
line of Pope — 



^6 JOURNAL OF 



Man never is, but always to be blest. 

This disposition is admirable when its aim is 
improvement ; when we look to coming days with a 
hope of growing better in them. The remembrance 
of the succession of one thing to another, i. e. of 
what went before, what followed, and what accom- 
panied it, is called an experiment. Many experi- 
ments make up experience; which is nothing else 
but a recollection of what antecedents were followed 
by what consequents. The definition belongs to 
Hobbes. Now the experiments of life, which we 
call our experience, are only valuable as they enable 
us to shape what we have to do, by success or failure 
in what we have done. Unproductive husbandry 
teaches us to look about for a wiser system of culti- 
vation. There must be more weeding, sowing, and 
watching in our fields. When the husbandman goes 
out to sow, we hear the shrill cry of the village boys 
scaring the birds from the furrows. The good seed 
of the mind is to be guarded from vain thoughts 
descending with fiercer hunger. Nor will our best 
instruction be drawn from books. If he who wishes 
to be pathetic and eloquent is to look in his heart 
and write ; in like manner, the scholar of time, com- 
pleting his education for eternity, will read some of 
his noblest lessons in the same volume, invisible to 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 17 

other eyeSj ever open to his own. And even among 
the fields and woodlands, he will still he at school. 

May 3d .— 

Oft on the dappled turf at ease, 

I sit and play with similes, 

Loose types of things through all degrees. 

This is "Wordsworth's plan and mine. I have 
been thinking of a new series of parallels more en- 
tertaining and profitable than Kurd's — Genius. Life, 
and Shadows. Did you ever spend a summer hour 
in making notes of shadows, with a view to their 
history? Then you would be astonished to find how 
the spreading, lengthening, and vanishing of a sha- 
dow, represent the growth, fulness, and decline of 
genius or life. In a green, overbowered lane, where 
birds shake dew and blossoms from the hedgerows, 
and spots of sun chequer the wayside grass, look for 
your own shadow. At what hour is it behind? 
When the sun shines in your face, your shadow is at 
your back. And has it ever been otherwise with 
poet, painter, or man of noble thought and magnifi- 
cent enterprise ? with Milton or Columbus ? Long 
and wearisome is their road to glory ; steep and en- 
tangled is the path towards the rising orb of their 
reputation. They behold not the shadow they cast; 



18 JOURNAL OF 

it stretches after them — cheering others, not them- 
selves. 

Retrace your steps down the glimmering lane. 
Let it be evening. What a change I Warm streaks 
of light gild the edges of bird-homes, and sleep in 
the dim hollows of mossy oaks. Where is your 
shadow now? It has sprung twenty feet before you, 
as if it were rushing up the garden, to sit down in 
the parlour, before you can turn the corner. It is a 
race between you and your shadow ; but you will 
never overtake it while you travel from the sun. 
Can you make no simile out of this ? When the 
day of intellectual life sets, and the pilgrim of poe- 
try, eloquence, or art, walks away from the glory of 
the morning, where is his shadow ? It is thrown 
forward into the untrodden paths of the future. It 
lengthens at every step, into the rich orchards of a 
remoter and sunnier climate. You have the history 
of the mind's shadow in the Shakspere of the seven- 
teenth and nineteenth centuries. 

But you may still 

— sit and play with similes, 

Loose types of things through all degrees. 

In this wood-path, where the violets cluster so thick 
under the elm, it is curious to watch the play of 
leaves on the grass. When the sun shines, and not 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 19 

even a summer breath rufHes the boughs, the images 
of trees lie unbroken. The sharp, irregular outline 
of each leaf is reflected. But the faintest breeze 
breaks the shadow. The wing of a bird drives an- 
other shade over it ; the heedless moth — a fly — a 
gnat, disperses it. The trees of fancy and taste are 
troubled by the same accidents. They fling their 
soft images of bloom over the sequestered walks of 
thought ; but the slightest things — the breath of 
envy, the twinkle of popularity— disorder their 
beauty. Waller, for a moment, obscures Milton ; 
Walpole buzzes down the sweet warble of Thomson. 
The shadow gives a parallel for a life as well as 
for a genius. That man fleeth like a shadow and 
never continueth in one stay, is among the most 
touching lessons of Holy Scripture. Our kindred, 
not less than our own recollections, illustrate the 
Prophet and the Psalmist : 

— for ever as we run, 
We cast a longer shadow in the sun? 
And now a charm, and now a grave is won. 

I am pleased to trace out the resemblance in my 
summer rambles ; and when I see myself climbing 
the silver beech, and losing my head in the top 
branches, a moral is not wanting. There is another 
and a livelier comparison. Sometimes I walk up 



20 JOURNAL OF 



to the park-palingj and endeavour to look my own 
shadow in the face ; but it is gone, and the robin. 

The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast, 

which sat on the top and seemed to sing to it, is 
vanished also. Here is a simile full of purifying 
truth. I remember, with good Arthur Warwick, 
that all our pleasures are shadows, thrown by pros- 
perous sunlight along our journey, and ever deceiv- 
ing and flying us most, when most we follow them. 
The vapoury form on the mossy pales, with the robin 
singing on its head, is only the emblem of some 
empty dream, that walks through life by our side, 
with Hope carolling above it, and disappearing when 
Reflection draws near, and looks at it with calm 
and earnest eye. And, while I moralize, the sun is 
sinking fast, 

— the slanting ray, 
From every herb and every spiry blade, 
Stretches a length of shadow o'er the field. 
Mine, spindling into longitude immense, 
In spite of gravity and sage remark. 
That I myself am but a fleeting shade — 
Provokes me to a smile. 



May 4th. — Eead a discourse of John Smith, 
whom Coleridge calls not the least star in the con- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 21 

stellation of Cambridge men. the contemporaries of 
Taylor. Smith was a native of Achurch, near Oun- 
dle, Northamptonshire. He was a pupil of Which- 
cotj at Emanuel, and died before he had completed 
his thirty-third year. Bishop Patrick, who knew 
him wellj and preached his funeral sermon, exclaimed, 
in the fervour of his admiration — '' What a man 
would he have been, if he had lived as long as I have 
done." He declared that Smith "spake of God and 
religion as he never heard man speak." We notice 
in his thoughts a calm largeness of idea, that is very 
impressive. For example : — " All those discourses 
which have been written for the soul's heraldry, will 
not blazon it so well to us as itself will do. When 
we turn our eyes in upon it, it will soon tell us its 
own royal pedigree and noble extraction, by those 
sacred hieroglyphics which it bears upon itself" 
Again : — " And because all those scattered rays of 
beauty and loveliness which we behold spread up 
and down, all the world over, are only the emana- 
tions of that inexhaustible light which is above, 
therefore should we love them all in that, and climb 
up always by those sunbeams unto the Eternal 
Father of Light." This thought is in the Platonic 
spirit of Spenser. And with equal nobleness of lan- 
guage he portrays the defaced condition of the 
human mind ; its splendour darkened, and the hand- 



22 JOURNAL OP 



writing of the Creator almost worn out. '• These 
principles of divine truth which were first engraven 
on man's heart with the finger of God are now, as 
the characters of some ancient monument, less clear 
and legible than at first." Coleridge, in the third 
volume of his Literary Remains, observes of the 
theological school of Smith — " Instead of the sub- 
servience of the body to the mind (the favourite 
language of our Sydneys and Miltons), we hear no- 
thing at present but of health, good digestion, plea- 
surable state of general feeling, and the like." 

May 5th. — A country clergyman, Mr. Nowell, 
has lately published some pleasing corrections of the 
zoology of our poets. The subject is attractive. 
Perhaps natural history, in its varieties of field, 
hedge, and woodland, is the element of decorative 
knowledge in which the poetical mind is most defi- 
cient. Even Thomson mistook the nature of the 
gad-fly, and spoke of its attack as collective, instead 
of solitary. Lord Byron compared Napoleon at 
Waterloo to the eagle^ " tearing with hloody beak 
the fatal plain ;" but the illustration of Reinagle 
led him to amend the description, because all birds 
of prey begin the assault with their talons. Milton, 
having later lights of science, seems to have been 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 23 



incorrecter than Shakspere. Mr. Nowell selects his 
sketch of the ant — 

The parsimonious emmet provident 
Of future — 

Ray, m 1691, gave the earliest refutation of this 
error. But our chief debt is due to Huber. The 
ant is known to be almost entirely carnivorous ; 
without skill to build garners, or store them with 
food. Nor is the winter-magazine necessary for the 
support of the insect, because the depth of its nest 
protects it from the weather, and severe frost ren- 
ders it torpid. 

Spenser and Milton give ex(][uisite sketches of 
the peacock — 

— fayre peacocks that excel in pride, 
And full of Argus eyes, their tayles dispredden wide. 

F. Q., B. i. c. 4. 

— Th* other whose gay train 
Adorns him, colour'd with the florid hue 
Of rainbows, and starry eyes- — 

P. L., B. vii. 444. 

Thomson very happily indicates the peculiarity 
of the bird's appearance, by saying that it spreads 
its 



24 JOURNAL OF 



— Eveiy-colour'd glory to tlie sun, 
And swims in radiant majesty along. 

When the peacock's train is up, the head and 
neck only are visible ; and, therefore, the poetical 
description of its diffused lustre and beauty is very 
lively and accurate. Its splendid feathers grow up 
the back. 

Occasionally the faithfulness of Milton is very 
startling, particularly in those slight circumstances 
of zoology, in which poetical footsteps are most 
likely to be caught tripping. It will be remembered, 
that he represents Satan entering the Garden under 
the form of a bird : 

— up he flew, and on the tree of life 
Sat like a cormorant, devising death 
To them that lived. 

Bishop Stanley remarks that the poet could not have 
clothed the Tempter in a more appropriate shape, as 
the appearance of the cormorant is unearthly and 
alarming; he notices "his slouching form,, his wet 
and vapid wings dangling from his side to catch the 
breeze, while his weird, haggard, wildly-staring eme- 
rald-green eyes, scowl about in all directions." Nor 
was the pictorial fitness of the form obtained at any 
expense of zoological accuracy ; for, though chiefly 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 25 

found among water scenery, tlie cormorant often 
perches on trees. A serrated claw of the middle 
toe, which distinguishes it from the pelican, enables 
it to cling to branches. 

It has been said, that all poets, ancient and 
modern, Shakspere alone being excepted, assign to 
the owl a melancholy epithet. Gray's " moping owl 
does to the moon complain" — Thomson shows " assi- 
duous in her bower the wailing owl" — Shakspere 
gives the true portrait, when he makes Lennox say, 
after the murder of Duncan — 

The obscure bird clamoiir'd the livelong night ; 

for the owl sleeps and hisses in the day, and at night 
hunts and screeches. " Hooting" is not its general 
mode of expression — not its vernacular. The moun- 
tain-owl flies at night, whooping when perched. A 
friend of Mr. White, in Hampshire, tried all the 
owls in his neighbourhood with a pitch-pipe, of the 
sort used for tuning harpsichords, and found them 
to hoot in B flat. But taste or capacity varies in 
the family, for the owls of Selborne range between 
G flat, F sharp, B flat, and A flat. The inquiring 
naturalist, who has given fame to that charming 
village, once heard two owls hooting at each other 
in difl'erent keys — two Arcadians indeed. 
2 



26 JOURNAL OF 



Beattie, in four of the most natural lines of 
English poetry, has indicated the flight and disposi- 
tion of the owl. leaving on the reader's mind, at the 
same time, the solemn sentiment of the landscape : 

Where the scared owl, on pinions grey, 
Breaks from the rusthng boughs ; 

And down the lone vale sails away, 
To more profound repose. 

The errors in Thomson's zoology have already 
been remarked, and other examples might be given, 
as in the description of the woodlark singing in 
copses ; because its custom is to warble on the wing 
— not soaring, but circling round its mate. 

For the most part, however, his pencil catches 
every colour and movement of bird or beast. How 
happy is the picture of the rock-pigeon : 

— beneath yon spreadmg ash, 
Hung o'er the steep, whence, borne on liq^nid wing, 
The soimding cidver shoots. 

The pigeon in full sweep gives a very remarkable 
sound. But the picturesque word, " shoots." had 
been already applied to the dove's flight by Dryden, 
in his musical translation of the lines in Virgil : — - 

At first she flutters; but at length she springs 
To smoother flighty and shoots upon her wings. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNT.RV. 27 

This imitative liarmony was sure to win the ear 
of Coleridge, from whose poetry many exquisite 
specimens might be selected. Take the following : 

— When the last rook 
Beat its straight path along the dusky air 
Homewards, I blest it ! deeming its black wing, 
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light) 
Had crossed the mighty orVs dilated glory, 
"While thou stood'st gazing ; or when all was still. 
Flew creeking o^er my head. 

The poet tells us that, some months after writing 
this line, he found Bartram describing the same pe- 
culiarity in the Savanna crane : "When these birds 
move their wings in flight, their strokes are slow, 
moderate, and regular; and even when at a consider- 
able distance or high above us, we plainly hear the 
quill feathers ; their shafts and webs upon one an- 
other creek as the joints or working of a vessel in a 
tempestuous sea." 

Among English poets, Bloomfield and Chire are 
remarkable for faithful happiness of description. 
The little portrait of the skylark by the former has 
'lie touch of life, — 

Yet oft beneath a cloud she sweeps along, 
Lost for awhile, yet pours her varied song. 



28 JOURNAL OF 



He views the spot, and as the cloud moves by, 
Again she stretches up the clear blue shy ; 
Her form, her motion, iindistingaished quite. 
Save when she wheels direct from shade to light, 

Coleridge has the same thought, uttered with in- 
ferior beauty — 

Oft with patient ear 
Long-listening to the viewless sky-lark*s note, 
Viewless, or haply for a moment seen 
Gleaming on sunny wings. 

The rural pictures of Clare, with less decoration, 
present equal truthfulness of colour and sound. 
Take the following scene in a summer evening walk : 

From the hedge, in drowsy hum, 
Heedless buzzing beetles bum, 
Haunting every bushy place. 
Flopping in the labourer'' s face, 
Now the snail hath made his ring ; 
And the moth with snowy wing 
Circles round in winding whirls^ 
Through sweet evening's sprinkled pearls. 
On each nodding bush besprent ; 
Dancing on from bent to bent; 
Now to downy grasses clung, 
Kesting for a while he's hung ; 
Then to ferry o'er the stream, 
Vanishing as flies a dream ; 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 29 

Playful still liis hours to keep, 
Till his time has come to sleep ; — 
In tall grass by fountain's head. 
Weary then he drops to bed. 

Two of the most pleasing curiosities of poetical 
zoology which I remember, are in Spenser, who 
describes an angel, 

Decked with divers plumes like painted jays ; 

and in Keats, who speaks of the dyes and stains of a 
chapel window, rich and numberless, 

As are the tiger-moth's deep damask'd wing3. 

May 6th. — I find Archdeacon Hare commending, 
with measureless praise, the genius of Mr. Landor. 
The judgment of Coleridge comes nearer to my 
taste : — '' What is it that Mr. Landor wants to make 
him a poet 1- His powers are certainly very consid- 
erable, but he seems totally deficient in that modify- 
ing faculty, which compresses several units into one 
whole. His poems, taken as wholes, are unintelligi- 
ble ; you have eminences excessively bright, and all 
the ground around and beneath them in darkness. 
Besides which, he has never learned, with all his 
energy, to write simple and lucid English." The 



!0 JOURNAL OF 



earnest and affectionate applause of Southey should 
be thrown into the opposite scale. His admiration 
of Gebir was evidently sincere. But a few beautiful 
thoughts, shooting up amid thick darloiess, offer to 
most readers the only allurement in Mr. Lander's 
poetry. His descriptions of the shell that still mur- 
murs of the ocean, and of the long moonbeam that — 

— on the hard wet sand 
Lay like a jasper column half iip-rear'd, 

are quite enchanting. Of every great author in 
prose or verse the motion within certain variations, 
is uniform. When the singing robe is put off, the 
dweller of Olympus may be known by his walk. 
It is not so with Mr. Lander. He glitters in purple, 
or hobbles in rags; is either a prince, or a mendicant 
on Parnassus. He altogether reverses his own char- 
acter of writers, who are to circulate through ages to 
come ; who, once '^ above the heads of contempora- 
ries, rise slowly and waveringly, then regularly and 
erectly, then rapidly and majestically, till the vision 
strains and aches as it pursues them in their ethereal 
elevation." This is precisely what he does not per- 
form. Now and then he disengages himself from the 
lumber that clogs him, and begins to ascend. For a 
moment, he goes up bravely, higher and higher, flash- 



SUMMER TIME lx\ THE COUNTRY. 31 



ing abroad fair colours in the sunlighxt, and catching 
glimpses of towered cities, crowded rivers, and spread- 
ing forests. We gaze after his flight with wonder. 
But before we can tell the story the buoyancy van- 
ishes, and the pilgrim of the sun is seen tumbling 
back to earth ; not with a flaming fall, but lifeless, 
powerless, collapsed — the breath of inspiration ex- 
hausted — to be dragged home in gaudy tatters and 
defilement. This catastrophe is to be regretted, in 
proportion as the ascending impulse is strong. 

Some passages of his prose are delightful. Read 
for example the conversation of Sir Philip Sydney 
and Lord Brooke at Penshurst, which breathes the 
wisest thoughts in a strain of music, winning and 
serious. But the author seldom sufi'ers our pleasure 
to be without a jar. His great deficiency seems to 
be in taste. He wants, to an extraordinary degree, 
that bright faculty which colours, subdues, shapes, and 
combines all the treasures of imagination. His music 
requires cadence, his painting tone. A coarse satiric 
humour sometimes breaks out. The efi'ect is most 
painful. It is a snatch of a political ballad, in the 
intricate melody of Mozart : it is a sweet face of Mu- 
rillo, with a border by Cruikshank. 

May 7th. — Coleridge says, or sings, very prettily 
of the nightingale, 



32 JOURNAL OF 



— on moonlit bushes, 
Whose dewy leaflets are but half disclosed, 
You may perhaps behold them in the twigs. 
Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full, 
Glistening, while many a glow-worm in the shade 
Lights lip her love-torch. 

In our quiet woods it is not very difficulty even in 
broad daylight, to see and hear the nightingale. This 
morning I stood for several minutes under the bough, 
and watched, not only the flashing of its "bright, 
bright eyes," but every quick beat and pulsation of 
what Isaac Walton calls its "little instrumental 
throat." The exertion, however, is more conspicuous 
in the black cap, when in garden or orchard it pours 
forth its inward melody. The throat is then dis- 
tended with the gush of notes. And this intensity 
of feeling and effort is sometimes fatal. A thrush 
has been known to break a bloodvessel in the midst 
of its music, and drop lifeless from the tree. Nor is 
the story of the nightingale dying of sorrow, to be 
considered a mere fiction of the poets. One or two 
instances of its emulative combats with human mu- 
sicians are sufficiently attested. 

It would be curious to trace the influence of cli- 
mate upon the song. Addison, inviting young Lord 
Warwick into the country, speaks of a concert in the 
neighbouring wood begun by blackbirds and concluded 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTPcY. 33 

by a nightingale J " with something of the Italian man- 
ner in her divisions." The English bird is supposed 
to possess, in a weaker degree, the continual warble, 
" the linked sweetness long drawn out," of her south- 
ern rival. The Persian note is affirmed to be the 
sweetest. The eastern nightingale, or bulbul, is, in- 
deed, of a distinct species, and nearly black ; but the 
same tone is recognized under every change of sun 
and verdure. The traveller can say — 

— Oft, where Spring 
Displayed her richest blossoms among files 
Of orange-trees bedeck'd with golden fruit 
Ripe for the hand, or under a thick shade 
Of Ilex, or, if better suited to the hour, 
The lightsome olive's twinkling canopy, — 
Oft have I heard the Nightingale and Thrush 
Blending as in a common English grove 
Their love songs. 

It is worth remarking that three lines of Homer 
comprise all the facts that later poets have enlarged 
with regard to the song and disposition of the night- 
ingale. He mentions its custom of hiding itself in the 
deepest foliage, and marks that many-sounding harmo- 
ny which gives to its repetitions their highest charm. 
The nightingale's peculiar love of wood-shelter is well 
expressed by Beaumont and Fletcher, who place it — 

Among the thick-leaved spring. 
2* 



34 JOURNAL OF 



I am not sure that Coleridge is right in the 

— one low piping sound more sweet than all : 

because the note of the nightingale seems never to be 
low. Its full song can be heard over th'fe diameter of 
a mile. Thomson happily preserves this character- 
istic: 

— she on the bough, 
Sole-sitting, still at every dying-fall 
Takes up again her lamentable strain 
Of winding love, till wide around the woods 
Sigh to her song, and with her wail resowid. 

And Wordsworthj modernising Chaucer : 

In the next bush that was me fast beside, 
I heard the lusty nightingale so sing, 
That her clear voice made a loud rioting, 
Echoing through all the green wood wide. 

Heber points out the same quality in the Indian rela- 
tive : — 

And what is she whose liquid strain 
Thrills through yon copse of sugar-cane ? 
I know that soul-entrancing swell, 
It is, it must be, Philomel. 

Sylvester — among whose craggy recesses of wild 
fancy, the youthful hand of Milton gathered a few 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 35 



sweet-smelling flowers — ^lias noticed a pleasing fea- 
ture of nightingales and tlieir music ; they are the 
part-singers of the woodlands, — 

Thence thirty steps, amid the leafy sprays, 
Another nightingale repeats her lays, 
Just note for note, and adds some strain at last 
That she had conned all the winter past. 

It is curious to observe how resolutely, even by 
writers on natural history, the fabulous shyness of 
the nightingale is still maintained. 

They who live in the country have daily opportu- 
nities of correcting the error. Enveloped by the 
greenest and shadiest coppices, the nightingale con- 
tinually selects a tree without a leaf, and perched 
upon a slender twig, pours out its choicest variations. 
It lives among the leaves, but commonly sings in 
the gay sunshine. 

Thomson's description of the mother-bird finding 
her nest plundered and empty, and giving utterance 
to her grief, is only a poetic fiction, though beauti- 
fuUv imagined : — 

Oft when returning with her loaded bill, 
The astonished mother finds a vacant nest, 
By the hard hand of unrelenting clowns, 
Robbed, to the ground the vain provision falls ; 
Her pinions rufile, and, low-drooping, scarce 



36 JOURNAL OP 



Can bear the mourner to the poplar shade, 
Where all abandoned to despair, she sings 
Her sorrows through the night. 

The true account of the nightingale's song is 
given by the same poet, in speaking of birds in 
general, when copse, and tree, and flowering furze, 
are spotted with nests : 

— The patient dam assiduous sits, 
Not to be tempted from her tender task, 
Or by sharp hunger, or by smooth delight. 
Though the whole loosened spring around her blows; 
Her sjmpathisiDg lover takes his stand 
High on th' opponent bank, and ceaseless sings 
The tedious time away. 

Among singing birds, the nightingale is unrivalled 
in the power of sustaining a note. He is surpassed 
in volume and compass of sound by the Campanero, 
or Bell-bird. In the silence of a South American or 
African night, it begins to toll ; continuing its one 
lonely cry at intervals of a minute. This toll, with 
its measured mournfulness of death, is clearly heard 
at a distance of three miles. But the nightingale 
despises monotony. Its song has sixteen different 
burdens, the same passage being never reproduced 
without some. change or embellishment. This varie- 
gated harmony is described by a French poet, R. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 



37 



BelleaUj wlio lived in the middle of the sixteenth 
centurjj and, for the sweet touches of his landscapes^ 
was called the Painter of Nature. 



Belleau. 

Le gentil rossignolet Dou- 

celet, 
Decoupe dessons rombrage, 
Mille fredons hahillars, Fre- 

tillarSf 
All doux chant de son ra- 

mage. 



Cary. 

The little nightingale sits 
singing aye 

On leafless spraj, 
And in her fitful strain doth 

run 
A thousand mid a thousand 
changes. 

With voice that ranges 
Thro' ev'ry sweet division. 



Some naturalists have Tbeen hold enough to write 
down the song — to give us the nightingale's score. 
The result has been a travestie. It is as if an ad- 
mirer of Laura had taken her portrait in red ochre, 
and sent it to Petrarch. 

Poetical descriptions of the nightingale's habits 
and music have seldom been the result of observa- 
tion and experience. The best are by Walton, re-j 
cording ^' the sweet descant, the rising and falling, 
the doubling and redoubling of her voice ;" by Grold- 
smith, when he said that the " pausing song " would 
be the proper epithet of its warble ; by Southey, in 
dwelling on its breadth and power, 



38 JOURNAL OF 



— Her deep and thrilling song 
Seemed with its piercing melody to reach 
The soul ; 

By Coleridge — 

— 'Tis the merry nightingale 

That crowds, and hurries, and precipitates 
With thick fast warble his delicious notes, 
As he were fearful that an April night 
Would be too short for him to utter forth 
His love-chant, and disburden his full soul 
Of all its music. 

By KeatS; telling how — 

— the plaintive anthem fades 

Past the near meadows, over the still stream, 
Up the hillside, and now 'tis buried deep 
In the next valley-glade : 

and more than all by Milton, who, living during his 
bright and happy youth among the leafy villages of 
BuckinghamshirOj was familiar with the nightingale 
in all hours of summer days and nights, and is never 
weary of introducing her. But it is observable, that 
he always associates the song with meditation and 
pensiveness. L' Allegro looks through the sweet- 
brier that clusters about the window at the lark 
soaring upwards — 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 39 

From his watch-tower in the skies, 
Till the dappled dawn doth rise. 

II Penseroso walks unseen along the wood-path^ lis- 
tening to the bird that 

— ^shuns the noise of folly, 
Most musical, most melancholy. 

And it Is the even-song that the poet lingers to hear. 
Whether it be in lyric, sonnet, or strain of higher 
moodj — the nightingale on 

— ^bloomy spray 
Warbles at eve, when all the woods are still. 

The tune is ever composed of — 

The liquid notes that close the eye of day. 

In Eden, where the earliest lovers, 

— ^lull'd by nightingales, embracing slept, 

the same sacred calm is preserved. By a single epi- 
thet the whole character of the music is fixed and 
painted, 

— sweet the coming on 
Of grateful evening mild; then silent night, 
With this her solemti bird. 



40 JOURNAL OP 



Price remarks that Miltoiij whose eyes seem to have 
been affected by every change of light, always speaks 
of twilight with peculiar pleasure ; he has even placed 
it in heaven — 

From that high mount of God, whence light and shade 
Spring forth, the face of brightness heaven had changed 
To grateful twilight 

He was indeed thirty-six years old before his sight 
grew weak and dim ; but the irritability of the organ 
was probably felt long before. 

I may mention one happy circumstance in the 
history of the nightingale's lay, which Coleridge ob- 
served. There is a pause in the dark wood ; the 
stars are dim ; suddenly the moon sails through the 
cloud ; the grass and leaves brighten — 

— and these wakeful birds 
Have all burst forth in choral minstrelsy, 
As if some sudden gale had swept at once 
A hundred airy harps. 

In Aleppo, nightingales are the popular concert- 
singers, engaged by the evening ; their cages are sus- 
pended from trees, and the company walk under them 
and enjoy the choir. But here, in this cool green- 
wood, they find pleasanter homes. A deep copse is 
the cage, with sunny leaves instead of wires, and 



SUMMER TIME IN TE^ COUNTRY. 41 

moonbeams sliding softly in for lanterns when it 
grows dark. All ! there he is again — how simple 
and unpretending in look and colour I Thomson's 
compliment to Pope paints the bird to a feather : 

— ^his eye was keen, 
"VYitli sweetness mixed. In russet brown bedight, 
As is his sister of the copses green. 

Can this be the nightingale which I heard singing 
on the same hawthorn in last May and June ? He 
left us in August, and has been absent between eight 
and nine months. What he must have seen and 
heard in his long vacation ! While the snow froze 
on my window, and his neighbour the robin sat piping 
on that sparkling bough, where was he !■ Probably 
enjoying a run among the Grreek Isles. I have read 
of a naturalist who understood the bird-language. 
Why did he not give lessons ? I should like to ask 
this nightingale a few questions about his travels ; 
such as — Whether he compared the dark sea, streaked 
by deepest purple, with our lake ? marble pillars of 
ruined temples on green hill-sides, with gables and 
porches of old Berkshire farms? or dim islands — Cos 
and Ithaca — glimmering through a cloud-curtain of 
silver, with our country towns, just visible in the 
early dawn ? Perhaps he preferred a tour in Egypt, 
long a favourite winter-home of his kindred. What 



42 JOURNAL OP 



food for those " bright, bright eyes," in the land of 
sphinxes and mummies ! What a stare at the Pyra- 
mids, and longing, lingering look at Rosetta ! Our 
Loddon — the tranquil and clear-flowing — is a pretty 
river ; but think of the Nile, sprinkled with spread- 
ing sails, and bordered by gardens. Pleasant falls 
the shade from vast boughs of sycamore and fig-trees ! 
I can see him plunging into the twilight groves of 
date, citron, lime, and banana, and covering himself 
over in gloom and fragrance. There, truly, he might 
sit " darkling." What bowers of roses ! But no — 
our wood challenges the world for roses ; and here 
Hafiz might have contented his own Bulbul. 

Surely that " bright, bright eye " drank in with 
wonder the living figures of the landscape — and, 
strangest of them all, the Arab in his long blue dress 
at the door of the Mosque of Abu-mandur. How 
different from our parish-clerk shutting the church 
windows in the evening! One is curious to know 
what a nightingale, on his first tour, would think of 
his own feathered brethren and the quadrupedal race :* 
— Of that rare fellow the pelican, with his six-men- 
power appetite — and the buffalo, his black nose snort- 
ing the Nile into foam, as he crosses from side to 
side. 

But the sweet musician who sits on his branch 
rejoicing, quite heedless of me or my speculations; 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 43 

may have taken a different road. If be visited the 
Archipelago and Egypt in former years, did he turn 
his wing to Syria ? Again I sigh for the bird-lan- 
guage. Touching stories that tongue might tell of 
the field which the Lord hath blessed with the dew of 
heaven, the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn 
and wine ; of the woody tops of Carmel ; the sunny 
vineyard and grassy upland ; the damask rose ; the 
stately palm of the Jordan ; the silver sands of Gen- 
nesaret ; and the sweet flowers^ — 

That o'er her western slope breathe airs of balm ; 

the hum of bees in clefts of the rocks ; the solemn 
olive-garden ; the lonely wayside ! For think of the 
reach of that large dark eye ! A French naturalist 
has calculated the sight of birds to be nine times 
more powerful than that of man. Belzoni himself 
would have been nearly blind by the side of this lit- 
tle brown explorer. 

But, oh ! unmindful nightingale ! a broader, 
brighter eye was bent over thee — the eye that never 
slumbers nor sleeps — as thou screenedst thyself in 
the orange branches. If even young ravens that 
call on Our Father are fed from His hands, and the 
sparrow, sitting alone on the housetop, does not fall 
to the ground unobserved or uncared for; surely 



44 JOURNAL OF 



thou art ever seen and watched — in the rose-gardens 
of the East, and the green coppices of English woods 
— dear pilgrim of music and beauty. I think thou 
art God's missionary, publishing abroad His wonders 
and love among the trees — most eloquent when the 
world is stillest. Time and Sin have not touched 
thee or thy melody. Where thou art, Paradise 
grows up before the eye of faith, as when the bur- 
nished boughs flung long shadows over Eve, dream- 
ing by moonlight within 

— a circling row 
Of goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit,— 
Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue. 

May 8th. — Goldsmith appears to have been very 
fond of Tibullus. " A diseased taste," he says, (Es- 
say xii.,) "will prefer Ovid to Tibullus, and the rant 
of Lee to the tenderness of Otway." Goldsmith's 
criticism was generally false, for Ovid includes Ti- 
bullus. However, some of his verses are very ele- 
gant ; Mr. Gary, the translator of Dante, applauds 
the conclusion of the first elegy, as one of the finest 
passages he remembered — and few modern scholars 
had a wider acquaintance with poetic literature. 
Lanzi remarks, that he who feels what Tibullus is 
in poetry, knows what Andrea del Sarto is in paint- 
ing. The parallel is apt ; Sarto was distinguished 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 45 

^^ - - 

by the finish of his style. In his " Holy Family 
Reposing," every hair has a distinct truth. The 
colouring of the painter corresponds with the lan- 
guage of the poet. In the fourth elegy of his third 
book, he describes himself tossing through a troubled 
nightj until, as the sun rose above the hills, he fell 
asleep. Suddenly his chamber brightened with a 
beautiful apparition, which is most exquisitely de- 
scribed. Each word has its own hue, like the sepa- 
rate hairs in Sarto's picture. Of all such excellence 
as that of Tibullus, the secret is labour. " I am 
glad your ' Fan' is mounted so soon ; but I would 
have you varnish and glaze it at your leisure, and 
polish the sticks as much as you can." This was 
Pope's advice to Gay, which he was too indolent to 
follow. Genius, when it has the large sensitive eyes 
of taste, is slow and painful : Guido never satisfied 
himself with an eye, nor A. Caracci with an ear. 
When Domenichino was reproached for not finishing 
a picture, he said, '' I am continually painting it 
within myself" How often Milton sat under a ce- 
dar with Eve, and Shakspere gazed into the passion- 
ate eyes of Juliet, before the last animating glow of 
beauty was imparted ! 

May 9th. — I see they are reprinting the speeches 
of Mr. Fox. It is known that Burke called him 



46 JOURNAL OF 



the most brilliant and accomplished debater the 
world ever saw. The praise was characteristic of 
the utterer and the subject. Burke, however, did 
not exclude the idea of eloquence from his definition. 
To Fox belonged the visible rhetoric. He swelled 
with the tide of invective, and rose upon the flood 
of his indignation. A dear friend has given me a 
vivid portrait of his manner and appearance. Hold- 
ing his hat grasped in both hands, and waved up and 
down with an ever-increasing velocity, while his face 
was turned to the gallery, he poured out tempestu- 
ous torrents of anger, exultation, and scorn. Fox 
the declaimer was paralyzed by Fox the man. It 
was affirmed by a Greek writer, in a passage made 
famous by Ben Jonson, that a poet cannot be great 
without first being good ; and Aristotle intimates, 
that the personal purity of the orator was a question 
moved in his own day. Fox showed the truth of 
this critical axiom. His intellectual capacity was 
impaired by the moral. The statue is imposing, but 
the pedestal leans. 

I will add that the late Mr. Green of Ipswich, 
an acute and well-informed observer, referred with 
admiration to Fox's speeches on the reform of Par- 
liament in 1797, on the Russian armament, and to 
his reply on the India Bill in 1783, which he pro- 
nounced to be absolutely stupendous. But the 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 47 

reader turns with most interest to tlie graceful side 
of his character ; his delight in the simpleness of 
rural pleasures, and the quiet charms of literature. 
It is very refreshing to accompany the stormy Cleon 
of Westminster into the shades of St. Anne's Hill, 
and see him, in the description of his surviving 
friend, 

— so soon of care beguiled, 
Playful, sincere, and artless as a child, 

enjoying the sunshine and flowers with an almost 
bucolic tenderness and freedom from restraint ; 
either 

— watching a bird's nest in the spray, 
Througb the green leaves exploring day by day ; 

or, with a volume of Dryden in his hand, wandering 

from grove to grove and seat to seat- 
To read there with a fervour all his own, 
And in his grand and melancholy tone, 
Some splendid passage not to him unknown. 

May 10th. — Rode over to Bramshill, the seat of 
Sir John Cope, and looked at Vandyck's portrait of 
himself '^ That Flemish painter — that Antonio 
Vandyck — what a power he has !" The apostrophe 



48 JOURNAL OF 



which Scott puts into the mouth of Cromwell at 
Whitehall, before the picture of Charles I., rises to 
every lip in the presence of Vandyck. In truth of 
imitation, delicacy of drawing, and dignity of ex- 
pression, he stands alone. No starveling forms of 
Albert Durer — to adopt a phrase of Fuseli — no 
swampy excrescences of Rembrandt, shuffle along in 
squalid deformity. Waller suggested the secret 
charm of his pencil in a most speaking line — 

Strange ! that thy hand should not inspire 
The beauty only, but the fire ; 
Not the form alone and grace, 
But art and power of a face. 

In a page on portrait-painters, I cannot omit two 
of different tastes, yet most wonderful genius — Hol- 
bein and Griorgione. No masters are more unlike ; 
each is the antithesis of the other. Hazlitt thought 
that the works of Holbein are to the finest efforts of 
the pencil what state papers are to history : they 
present the character in part, but only the dry, the 
concrete, the fixed. Griorgione, on the contrary, 
gives the inner spirit and life of thought. His 
faces are ideal, and yet real. The same countenance 
painted by Holbein and Giorgione, would resemble 
an English story told by Hollinshed and illuminated 
by Spenser. Both are precious — the fact as authen- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 49 

ticating the poetry, and the poetry as embellishing 
the fact. In a parallel. Rubens would naturally 
come in ; but EaiFaelle cannot be bracketed. 

Something of imaginative reality is seen in Van- 
dyck ; in general beauty and completeness, he yields 
to Titian. " Vandyck's portraits," said Northcotej 
" are like pictures ; Reynolds', like reflections in a 
looking-glass ; Titian's, like the real people." Mr. 
Eastlake has a very interesting remark oa this char- 
acteristic of Titian, in a note to Goethe's theory of 
colours. He observes, with reference to the flesh- 
tint, that its effects, at different distances, can never 
be so well compared, as when the painter and his 
subject draw near and go by each other on an element 
so smooth, in scenery so tranquil, as Venice afforded 
to its greatest painter. Gliding along the waveless 
canals in the calm gondola, the rich complexions of 
Italian beauty, and the serious grandeur of manly 
wisdom, delighted his eye. The same writer reminds 
us, that the season for these artistic studies was the 
evening, when the sun had set behind the hills of 
Bassano, and a glowing and scattered light poured a 
balmy softness into all the shadows. Living in the 
northern part of Venice, Titian enjoyed in their 
fulness these charming twilights. I may add, that 
Uvedale Price considered the whole system of Vene- 
tian colouring, particularly of Giorgione and Titian, 
3 



50 JOURNAL OP 



to have been founded upon the tints of autumn ; 
while Rubens looked for his brilliant hues in the 
light freshness of the early spring. Hence the warm 
golden tinge of the one, and the dewy gaiety of the 
other. The flowers of Titian and Rubens belong to 
different seasons of the year. 



'to 



May 12th. — I always find it pleasanter to let 
authors or celebrated men tell their own history, than 
to read it in biographies. The discoveries may be 
slight, but how life-like ! We catch the form and 
face in a looking-glass, of which the person reflected 
is unconscious. He has no opportunity of making 
up his countenance, but is sketched, like Pope while 
in conversation with a friend in the gallery of Prior 
Park, and transferred to canvass before he knows 
that an eye is on him — hump and all. My meaning 
will be brought out by a few examples. Shenstone 
communicates to one of his correspondents the rava- 
ges of a caterpillar, which had devoured the green- 
ness of Lord Lyttleton's large oaks, while his own 
were protected by their insignificance. This one par- 
agraph unfolds the secret of his existence. The 
hinge of his happiness was the fame of the Leasowes 
— when that turned easily, he was at peace. The 
insect eating his neighbour's tree, was his own biogra- 
phy in miniature. Every body knows Pcpys, and 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY, 51 

laughs at him ; he was a frivolous gossip at court ; a 
thinner kind of Horace Walpole. But the following 
circumstance reduces him to smaller dimensions. A 
subject that weighed heavily on his thoughts during 
the great Plague was the fate and fashion of peri- 
wigs ; thenceforward, people would buy no hair, lest 
it had been cut from the heads of those who died of 
the pestilence. The periwig was the memoir of Pepys 
in a summary. 

Lord Chatham was an admirable reader of poetry, 
and sometimes delighted his friends with scenes from 
Shakspere's historical plays ; but when he came to 
any episode or fragment of comedy, he always handed 
the book to a relative. Combine this incident with 
the public life and appearance of the statesman, as 
displayed in the crimson drapery — the tye-wig— the 
statuesque attitude — and the Under Secretaries, who 
were not permitted to sit down in his official pre- 
sence ; and admit that the Clown left out is an indi- 
cation of character. 

I confess that Pope's " good-natured Garth" has 
sunk in my esteem, since I read of Gray setting him 
down at the Opera, and receiving a squeeze of the 
forefinger by way of thanks. A straw shows the 
wind, and shaking hands is a manifestation of mind. 
Latin biography affords a different specimen : " I 
have received," wrote Pliny to a friend, '^ the same 



52 JOURNAL OF 



bad account of my own little farms, and am myself, 
therefore, at fall leisure to write books for you, pro- 
vided I can but raise money enough to furnish me with 
good paper. For should I be reduced to the coarse 
and spongy sort, either I must not write at all, or 
whatever I compose must necessarily undergo one 
cruel blot." Thus agricultural distress sinks into a 
question of " outsides ;" and Trajan himself might 
have waited for his panegyric if the ink had been 
watered. 

Sometimes a bias is given to the mind by a par- 
ticular occurrence, which all its future motions ac- 
knowledge. We have an instance in Franklin, relat- 
ed by himself He was leaving the library of Dr. 
Mather, at Boston, by a narrow passage, in which a 
beam projected from the roof They continued talk- 
ing, until Mather suddenly called out — " Stoop ! 
stooj^ /" Before his visitor could obey the warning, 
his head struck sharply against the beam. ^' You are 
young," said his friend, ^' and have the world before 
you ; stoop as you go through it, and you will miss 
many hard thumps." Franklin recollected the cau- 
tion, especially when he saw people mortified by car- 
rying their heads too high. He did not, however, 
limit the advice to a prudent humility ; it was the 
motto of his life — he went to his grave stooping. 
All his thoughts, desires, and actions, were of one 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 53 

growth and stature — clever, but stunted. His writ- 
ings are cramped into the same posture ; so that one, 
not indisposed to value or applaud his talents, has re- 
marked, that in his hands " a great subject sometimes 
seems to become less while it is elucidated, and less 
commanding while it is enforced." And thus it came 
to pass that an accidental moral, drawn from a beam 
in a roof, influenced for ill the judgment and conduct 
of a remarkable person. 

Perhaps the gleams of deep inward thought and 
feeling that shine and melt over the familiar letter, 
poem, or criticism, are to be preferred even to the 
talk of the writer, as being more sincere and unaffect- 
ed. Conversation, however, gives very clear traits of 
character — it is the shadow on the dial, telling the 
hour. But they must be marked at the instant ; a 
looker-on should be quick and cautious. If you bend 
over the dial, you break the shadow, and the clock is 
silent ; at the best, the indication never continues 
long, because the light burns only for a moment, and 
is gone. Our happy glimpses of Johnson, revelations 
of his dignity, virtues, follies, wisdom, and weakness, 
are owing to this. Boswell was generally at hand to 
catch and copy the feature, as the illumination of 
anger, pleasure, imagination, or disease, sparkled be- 
hind the fleshly veil. He seized the shape and colour 
of the moral transparency before the flame vanished. 



54 JOURNAL OP 



Occasionally, a single anecdote opens a character ; 
biography has its comparative anatomy, and a saying 
or a sentiment enables the skilful hand to construct 
the skeleton. Lord Marchmont tells us that Pope 
fell asleep if the conversation was not epigrammatic. 
The first act of Sterne, on entering a drawing-room, 
was to take from his pocket a page of a new volume 
of Tristram Shandy and read it to the company. 
The poet of the Essay on Man, and the caricaturist 
of Trim, ascend immediately to the eye, while we 
read these slight circumstances of their private his- 
tory. 

Indications of character are recognized in pictures 
as well as in books. RafFaelle paints his own autobi- 
ography, as Spenser writes it. I will refer to the 
different aspects under which the history of the Cru- 
cifixion has been represented ; consulting Burnet's 
notes on Reynolds by the way. M. Angelo, whose 
power lay chiefly in expression and grace of contour, 
selected the view of the subject likeliest to favour his 
peculiar talent : Eaffaelle, for the same reason, chose 
the point of time when the body is taken down. 
Tintoret concentrates his force in the suffering Mo- 
ther at the foot of the Cross : Rubens dares every 
variety of attitude. In one design, we have the ele- 
vation of the Cross ; in another, the executioners are 
breaking the legs of the thieves. Here the grouping 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 55 

may be more effective ; there, the colouring more 
brilliant ; but in each and all, picturesque results, 
without regard to truth, are the aim proposed. In 
Eembrandt, light and shade become the conspicuous 
elements ; and, remembering that darkness overspread 
the land, he portrays the taking down from the Cross 
by moonlight. Thus, in the painter and the poet, the 
inward consciousness of power is beheld working by 
favourite instruments. One hand shows its cunning 
in light ; a second, in shadow ; a third, in anatomy ; 
and men, books, and pictures, give us in their own 
way indications of character. 

May 13th. — I was interested to-day by the re- 
mark of one of our most accomplished portrait-paint- 
ers. He says that he has observed, in every cele- 
brated person whose features he copied, from the 
Duke of Wellington downwards, a looking of the eye 
into remote space. The idea occurs often in litera- 
ture. Milton, perhaps, led the way by his description 
of Melancholy: 

— with even step and musing gait, 
And looks commercing with the skies, 
The rapt soul sitting in her eyes ! 

Sterne assigns the same peculiarity to the face of his 
Monk, in the Sentimental Journey. His head, ''mild. 



56 JOURNAL OP 



pale, penetrating ; free from all common-place ideas 
of fat, contented ignorance looking downwards upon 
earth ; it looked forward^ hut looked as if it looked 
at something beyond the ivorldP Nothing can be 
more exquisite than the iteration. The late Mr. 
Foster probably had this portrait in his remem- 
brance, when he described the Christian in society — 
in the world, but not of it : " He is like a person 
whose eye, while he is conversing with you about an 
object, or a succession of objects, immediately near, 
should glance every moment toivards some great 
spectacle appearing in the distant horizon^ 

Mr. Moore's elegant tale of the Epicurean sup- 
plies another example : Alethe raises a silver cup 
from the shrine — " Bringing it close to her lips, she 
kissed it with a religious fervour ; then turning her 
eyes mournfully upwards, held them fixed with a 
degree of earnestness, as if in that moment, in direct 
communion with heaven, they saw neither roof nor 
any earthly barrier between them and the skies. '^ 
And a fifth illustration is furnished by Mr. Keble, 
in his picture of Balaam foretelling the happiness 
of Israel, and the rising of the Star : — 



O for a sculptor's hand, 

That thou might' st take thy stand, 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 57 

Thy wild hair floating on the eastern breeze ; 

Thy tranc'd yet open gaze 

Fix'd on the desert haze, 
As one who deep in heaven some airy pageant sees. 

The artist to whom I allude does not add liter- 
ature to his genius. I believe that he never heard 
of Foster ; it is just possible that he may be unac- 
quainted -with Sterne. His remark would then be 
the fruit of independent and individual experience ; 
and on that account lending a most interesting com- 
mentary upon the illustrations of fancy. 

May 14th. — The earliest editor of Bossuet's Ser- 
mons describes the writer to have been a diligent 
student of Tertullian, Chrysostom, and Augustine. 
But he looks on him as appropriating what he bor- 
rows, and being scarcely less original when he quotes 
than when he invents. This is only an exaggerated 
anticipation of Hall's panegyric of Burke's imperial 
fancy, " laying all nature under tribute." Such a 
mind translates an image into its own language, as 
we may learn from two of our poets : Cowley de- 
scribes the equipment of Goliath, and Milton puts it 
into the hands of Satan :— 



8* 



58 JOURNAL OF 



Cowley. 

His spear the trunk was of a 

lofty tree, 
Which nature meant some 

tall ship's mast should be. 



Milton. 

His spear, to equal which the 

tallest pine 
Hewn on Norwegian hills, to 

be the mast 
Of some high admiral, were 

but a wand. 
He walked with. 



Here Milton heightens the picture by circumstances 
that impart to it the dignity of invention. The 
spear of the Devil is far grander than that of the 
Giant. It is the difference between the dialect of 
gods and men in the Iliad We read the same les- 
son in Art. The eye of taste has long been familiar 
with the Notte of Correggio, and the flowing out of 
light from the Child into the Mother's face. The 
thought itselfj however, was not new. In the Vati- 
can fresco of St. Peter delivered from prison, Raffa- 
elle makes the lustre proceed from the angel. Cor- 
reggio and Milton, therefore, are imitators alike, but 
their debts do not diminish their capital. Each car- 
ries large interest. I think the same allowance is 
due to Campbell and Rogers in the following verses ; 
although, in the case of the second writer, a note of 
acknowledgment seems to be demanded. The pas- 
sage from Campbell occurs in his description of 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 59 

Adam wandering restless through Paradise, before 
the creation of Eve : — 

And say, without our hopes, without our fears, 
'Without the home that plighted love endears, 
Without the smile, from, partial beauty Tvon, 
Oh ! ichat luere man / — a icorld vdtliout a sun. 

The hist line is the most striking of the four, hut it 
is at least twelve hundred years old. Luther quotes 
the phrase from St. Auo:ustine : — ^-'A marriasre with- 
out children is the world without the sun." 

In the Pleasui'es of 3Iemory. which inspired 
those of Hope, the perishing natui'e of that bless- 
ing is elegantly delineated : — 

lighter than air, Hope's summer visions fly ; 
If but a fleeting cloud obscure the sky, 
If but a beam of sober reason play, — 
Lo ! fancy's fairy frost-work melts away. 

Compare these verses with TVarburton's Inquiry into 
the Causes of Prodigies, as related by Historians, 
where he paints with singular force and beauty the 
fickleness of Sallust — at one time the advocate of 
public spirit, and. at another, sharing in the robber- 
ies of Caesar : •• Xo sooner did the warm aspect of 
good fortune shine out again, but all those exalted 
ideas of virtue and honour raised like a beautiful 



60 JOURNAL OP 



kind of frost-work in the cold season of adversity^ 
dissolved and disappeared?^ 

The question of imitation has Ibeen treated by 
Hurd with ingenuity and taste ; and his essay will 
be consulted with pleasure and advantage. The art 
of discovering the elements of beauty, and modify- 
ing them to his own use, appears to be one of the 
chief implements of the orator and poet. Burke 
told Barry — " There is no faculty of the mind which 
can bring its energy into effect, unless the memory 
be stored with ideas for it to work on." Genius 
made Achilles and Lady Macbeth, but observation 
of character supplied the rudiments of creation. In 
one, we have the ideal of heroism — in the other of 
crime. The supremacy of intellect is shown in the 
elevation and brightening of each borrowed feature, 
so as to harmonize with the countenance into which 
it is blended. In other words, imitation must be 
governed by selection. The pictures of Caravaggio 
exhibit the injurious results of one of these qualities 
in isolation. A beggar is transformed into a saint, 
but the mendicant nature remains under the new 
type. The same defect is observable in Guido. The 
feminine expression constantly reappears; Venus and 
Judith are equally delicate and gentle. In looking, 
therefore, at the cloud of poets whom the commen- 
tators bring forward as creditors of Milton, we may 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 61 



recollect Opie's definition, and resolve invention into 
the command of a large treasury of ideas, and an 
instinctive readiness and grace in combining them 
through every variety of shape and colour. 

May 15th.— It was in the neighbouring village 
of Swallowfield that Lady Clarendon displayed her 
taste for flowers. Why have we no history of Eng- 
lish gardens? It might make a reputation. Mr. 
Johnson has drawn up a sketch, but dry and imper- 
fect. We want Evelyn and Walpole united, with a 
tinge of Gray. The monks were the first horticul- 
turists. Orchards and gardens grew round the se- 
questered homes of learning. Chaucer describes a 
garden of the fifteenth century — 

This yerde was large, and railed al the aleyes, 
And shadowed well with blossoming bowis grene, 
And trenched newe, and sandid all the wayes. 

The gardens of Nonsuch, in the reign of Henry 
VIII., might be taken as the starting-point. About 
the same period, Hampton Court was laid out by 
Wolsey. A paper in the " Archseologia" supplies 
some pleasing notices ; and a scholar, of high attain- 
ments, recently communicated several particulars to 
the open and watchful ear of Sylvanus Urban. He 
mentions Hollar's engraving of Boscobel and Lord 



62 JOURNAL OF 



Arundel's seat in Surrey ; the delicious pleasure- 
grounds of Sir Matthew Decker on Kichmond-green, 
where the pine-apple was first brought to perfection ; 
BeddingtoUj the place of the Carews, a'nd the home 
of the earliest orange-tree planted in England ; and 
Ham House, on the banks of the Thames, shaded 
by spreading elms, and still reminding us of Eve- 
l^m's account of its pastures, orangeries, groves, 
fountains, and aviaries. In later days. Ham House 
has been sketched by the same pencil that gave fame 
to Our Village. ^' Ham House is a perfect model of 
the mansion of the last century, with its dark, shad- 
owy front, its steps and terraces, its marble basins, 
and its deep silent court. Harlow Place must have 
been just such an abode of stateliness and seclusion. 
Those iron gates seem to have been erected for no 
other purpose than to divide Lovelace from Clarissa 
— they look so stern, and so unrelenting. If there 
were any Clarissas now-a-days, they would be found 
at Ham House. And the keeping is so perfect. 
The very flowers are old-fashioned. No American 
borders, no kahmias or azaleas, or magnolias, or such 
heathen shrubs. No flimsy China roses. Nothing 
new-fangled. None but flowers of the olden time, 
arranged in gay, formal knots, staid, and trim, and 
regular, and without a leaf awry." 

I may add that Camden, a contemporary of Spen- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 63 

_______„_______ t __________„ 

ser, mentions Guy-Cliffe, in Warwickshire, with unu- 
sual animation ; and Sir William Temple bestows a 
panegyric on Sir Henry Fanshawe's flower-garden at 
Ware Park, and his artistic arrangement of colours. 
"He did so precisely examine the tinctures and sea- 
sons of his flowers, that in their settings the inward- 
est of which that were to come up at the same time 
should be always a little darker than the utmost, 
and so serve them for a kind of gentle shadow." 
Temple also mentions, as the '^ perfectest figure of 
a garden" he ever saw, " either at home or abroad." 
the one made by the Countess of Bedford, who was 
the theme of Donne and his poetic brethren. It 
combined every excellence of the antique pleasure- 
ground ; the terrace gravel-walk, three hundred paces 
long, and broad in proportion ; " the border set with 
standard laurels, and at large distances, which have 
the beauty of orange-trees, both of flower and fruit;" 
the stone steps, in three series, leading to extensive 
parterres ; the fountains and statues ; summer- 
houses ; and a cloister facing the south and covered 
with vines. These, with the ivied balustrade, and — 

Walls mellowed into harmony by time, 

composed a garden that suited, while it encouraged, 
the meditative temper of our ancestors. 



64 JOURNAL OF 



The English garden of the sixteenth century 
was the Latin reproduced. Lord Bacon's walks and 
topiary work at Gorhambury were reflections of 
Pliny's Tusculan Villa. The solemn terrace, sloping 
lawn, little flower-garden, with fountain in the cen- 
tre, and sculptured trees, were common to both. 
Evelyn's garden was a happy example. Perhaps 
the antique system had more than one feature wor- 
thy of preservation. It is pleasant to look at Pliny, 
through one of his own amusing letters, sitting in a 
room shaded by plane-trees, and, like Sidney — 

Deaf to noise and blind to light; 

or sauntering beneath an embowered walk of vines, 
so soft that his uncovered feet sufl'ered no inconve- 
nience. Pope describes such a path in his ingenious 
imitation of Cowley — 

There in bright drops the crystal fountains play, 
By laurels shaded from the piercing day ; 
Where summer's beauty, midst of winter strays 
And winter's coolness spite of summer's rays. 

And Milton shows our first parents, in Eden, rising 
with the early dawn to dress the 

— alleys green, 
Their walk at noon, with branches over-grown. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 65 

Bacon, in gardening as in philosophy, had the 
prophetic eye. He foresaw the charm of ornamental 
scenery, which was to delight the refined taste of 
another generation. Mason praises him for banish- 
ing the crisped knot and artificial foliage, while he 
restored the ample lawn, 

— to feast their sight 
With verdure Dure, unbroken, unabridged. 

Bacon and Milton were the prophet and the 
herald. Pope and Addison the reformer and the 
legislator, of horticulture — Pope in the Spectator, 
Addison in the Guardian. Neither was a mere the- 
orist. Addison made a few experiments in land- 
scape-decoration at his rural seat, near Rugby ; and 
Pope created a little Elysium at Twickenham. 
However modern rhymers about green fields may 
deride him, he loved nature and understood her 
charms. In a letter to Richardson, written in the 
freshness of a summer morning, he invites him to 
pass the day among his shades, " and as much of 
the night as a fine moon allows." From the heat of 
noon he retreated into his grotto — fit haunt for poet- 
ry and wood-nymphs ! Sails gliding up and down 
the river cast a faint, vanishing gleam through a 
sloping arcade of trees ; and when the doors of the 
grotto were closed, the changeful scenery of hills. 



66 JOURNAL OP 



woods, and boats were reflected on the wall. As the 
sun sank behind the branches, his terrace tempted 
him abroad : it commanded the finest reach of the 
river. At Richmond, in the words of Thomson, 

— the silver Thames first rural grows, 
Fair winding up to where the Muses haunt^ 
In Twit'nam's bowers. 

The leafy walks of Ham were opposite, and Peter- 
sham-wood lent a dark frame to the bright hill of 
Richmond, of which the Saxon name, Shene^ or bril- 
liancy, is so happily descriptive. Not a foot of 
ground was overlooked or unembellished. Within 
the small enclosure of five acres. Pope had a charming 
flower-garden — his own work — an orangery, bowling- 
green, and vineyard. There he feasted his friends, 
Swift saying grace, which Dr. Wharton declares that 
he always did with remarkable devotion : — 

'Tis true no turhots dignify my boards, 

But gudgeon, flounders, which my Thames affbrds ; 

To Hounslow Heath I point, and Banstead Down, 

Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own. 

From yon old walnut-tree a shower shall fall, 

And grapes, long ling'ring on my only wall, 

And figs from standard and espalier join. 

Nor should that other garden be forgotten, where, 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 67 

— through the gloom of Shenstone's fairy grove, 
Maria's urn still breathes the voice of love. 

It was the creation and home of a most accomplished 
per son J who delighted in every refinement of rural 
taste, and brought elegance into a rustic farm, to — 

Grace its lone vales with many a budding rose, 

New founts of bliss disclose, 
Call for refreshing shades, and decorate repose. 

Whately gave tlie best account of the Leasowes. 
The prospect from the grounds was rich and varied. 
Immediately under the eye lay the town of Hales 
Owen. The Wrekin, thirty miles distant, rose clearly 
above the horizon ; a grove overhung a small valley, 
through which a rivulet flowed, with clusters of open 
coppice-wood scattered along its banks, and the sha- 
dow of every leaf marked on the water. Shenstone 
had no model to work after, and his zig-zag walk, gilt 
urn, and other eccentricities, may well be forgiven. 
But he felt the melancholy complaint of a heart even 
sadder than his own : 

How ill the scenes that offer rest, 
And hearts, that cannot rest, agree. 

" I feed my wild ducks, I water my carnations ! happy 



68 JOURNAL OP 



enough if I could extinguisli my ambition quite, or 
indulge my desire of being something more beneficial 
in my sphere." 

Shenstone's hardest trial was the nearness of Hag- 
ley — it was the sonneteer living next door to the epic 
poet. What was Virgil's Grove compared with the 
Tinian Lawn, encircled by stately trees, so full of leaf 
that no branch or stem was visible — nothing but large 
undulating masses of foliage. How insignificant be- 
came all rustic ornament before the solitary urn, cho- 
sen by Pope himself for the spot, afterwards inscribed 
to his memory, and " shown by a gleam of moonlight 
through the trees." Whately touches the autumnal 
beauty of this scene with great sweetness : " It is 
delightful to saunter here, and see the grass and gos- 
samer which entwine it glistening with dew ; to lis- 
ten and hear nothing stir, except, perhaps, a withered 
leaf dropping gently through a tree." The exquisite 
lines of Thomson are recalled by the imitation : 

— for now the leaf 
Incessant rustles from the mournful grove, 
Oft startling such as studious walk below. 

By degrees, the influence of taste began to spread. 
Gardening, like criticism, was taught by the poets. 
Kent attributes his skill in laying out ground to the 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 69 

study of Spenser. But pictures helped him. In 
Pope's graceful letter to Lord Burlingtoiij he speaks 
of 

— Kent, who felt 
The pencil's power. 

Stowe and Claremont were celebrated hy Garth, 
Thomson, and Walpole : Esher, too, received the 
praise of the learned poet, to whom Kent was deeply 
indebted for fame and assistance : — 

Pleased let me stray in Esher's peaceful grove, 
Where Kent and nature vie lor Pelham's love. 

Brown was another architect of gardens, who has 
found a niche in poetry. Cooper regarded his deso- 
lating style with indignation and contempt : — 

He speaks ! the lake in front becomes a lawn, 
Woods vanish, hills subside, and valleys rise. 

But he had a good eye for particular effects, and 
his treatment of water at Blenheim was admirable. 
" I used to think it," was the lively saying of Wal- 
pole, "one of the ugliest places in England; a giant's 
castle, who had laid waste all the country round him." 
In the garden-scene, Brown showed his power ; he was 



70 JOURNAL OP 



the reformer of gravel-walks. A friend reminds me 
of two other improvers of gardens — Mr. Hamilton, 
who shaped the beautiful grounds at Payne's Hill ; 
and the great Lord Chatham, who in the eagerness of 
his temper designed lawns by torch-light, and was so 
careless of expense, that he spread the streams in the 
little valleys of Kent and Middlesex into lakes, and 
covered the hills of Somersetshire with cedars that 
he sent from the nurseries of London. One charm 
of an English garden is quite peculiar to it — freshness 
and beauty of turf The grass-plot is as much our 
own as the green hedge. Throughout Italy — ^with 
the single exception of Caserta — the bright English 
colour - is unknown. Perhaps the quiet courts of our 
colleges present the finest specimens of grass; and 
the meadows behind Trinity and Clare are abundant- 
ly gay and fruitful. There wantons the "pad" of the 
modern abbot — 

His sleek sides bathing in the dewy green. 

Happy is he in his labour and his rest. No commis- 
sion disturbs his stall. He cares not for corn-laws, 
watched over by the benevolent eye of the Bursar ; 
and in the warm twilight of a June evening, it is very 
pleasant to hear him leisurely pattering home under 
the dim avenue of limes. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 71 

The picturesque tourist in England may find nu- 
merous pleasure-grounds to reward his industry. It 
will be sufiicient to specify the Chinese garden at 
Cassiobury, famous in Evelyn's time, with conservato- 
ry and pagoda full of porcelain, mandarins, paintings, 
and gold fish, all set ofi" by large tea-plants ; the an- 
tique flower-garden at Hatfield, Lord Salisbury's, with 
its walks over-arched by clipped lime-trees ; the rock- 
garden of Lady Broughton, who spent eight years in 
its composition ; and of the late Mr. Wells, at Red- 
Leaf, where Nature herself is the most liberal and 
accomplished contributor. The chief beauty of White 
Knights, now broken up, arose from the display of 
exotics, and the variegated flush of colour. 

One word on London gardens may not be unin- 
teresting. No passage in the Task is more familiar 
to poetic ears, than the description of the citizen's 
delight in a glimpse of flowers on his wall : 

The villas with which London stands begirt, 

Like a swarth Indian with his belt of beads, 

Prove it. 

A. garden in which nothing thrives, has charms 

To soothe the rich possessor, much consoled 

That here and there some sprigs of mournful mint, 

Or nightshade, or valerian, grace the wall 

He cultivates. 

But a great change has come over the London gar- 



72 JOURNAL OF 



dens since Cowper's day. The late Mr. Loudon drew 
attention to the costly plants often found in them. 
He gave this explanation : — The gardens of suburban 
streets are planted by speculative builders, and chiefly 
from nursery sales, which have been very frequent 
during the last twenty or thirty years. It is the cus- 
tom at these auctions to mix rare with common plants, 
that the former may sell the latter. In this way, the 
choicest specimens have found their way into the 
grass-plots of cottage-villas, or the humbler row. 

I have not spoken of the moral influence of a gar- 
den ; but it is lively and lasting. Is there not a holy 
truth in the angel's admonition to Esdras, (II. ix. 
24-5,) " Go into a field of flowers where no house is 
builded, and eat only the flowers of the field ; taste 
no flesh, drink no wine, but eat flowers only. And 
pray unto the Highest continually — then will I come 
and talk with thee." " Happy they who can create a 
rose, or erect a honeysuckle." The remark is Gray's, 
and history furnishes touching testimony to its truth. 
When Hough visited Bancroft in Sufi'olk, he found 
him working in his garden ; " Almost all you see," 
said the good Archbishop, " is the work of my own 
hands, though I am bordering on eighty years of age. 
My old woman does the weeding, and John mows the 
turf and digs for me ; but all the nicer work — the 
sowing, grafting, budding, transplanting, and the like 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 73 

— I trust to no other hand but my own — so long, at 
least, as my health will allow me to enjoy so pleasing 
an oecupation ; and in good sooth, the fruits here 
taste more sweet, and the flowers have a richer per- 
fume, than they had at Lambeth." If Saner oft could 
have foreseen the Task, he would have heard his voice 
reflected in the writer's account of his own rustic 
labours : 

— no works, indeed, 
That ask robust tough sinews, bred to toil, 
Servile employ ; but such as may amuse, 
K"ot tire, demanding rath-er skill than force. 

Though a mightier hand than Cowper's had long be- 
fore, in a magnificent history-piece, exhibited the ear- 
liest gardeners of the world reposing after their toil — 

Under a tuft of shade that on the green 
Stood whispering soft, by a fresh fountain side 
They sat them down ; and after no more toil 
Of their sw^et gard'ning labour than sufficed 
To recommend cool zephyr, and made ease 
More easy. 

We have, in our gallery of literature, two very 
celebrated personages, who were always longing for 
country seclusion, and at length obtained what they 
sought— Cowley and Bolingbroke. Perhaps this wish 



74 JOURNAL OF 



was the only point of agreement between them. " I 
never had any other desire," wrote the poet to Eve- 
lyn, "so like to covetousness as that one which I have 
always had — that I might he the master at last of a 
small house and a large garden, and there dedicate 
the remainder of my life only to the culture of flow- 
ers and the study of nature." The lover of sweet 
fancies has reason to regret that Cowley did not find 
the Eden he anticipated, or live to make it what he 
hoped ; he had the " inward eye which is the bliss of 
solitude," and discovered in the meanest flower or 
weed by the hedge-row — 

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 

These verses, especially those in Italics, seem to 
enfold the whole system of Mr. Wordsworth — to be 
at once its text and compendium. Cowley is writing 
to Evelyn about a garden : 

Where does the Wisdom and the Power Divine 
In a more bright and sweet reflection shine? 
"Where do we finer strokes and colours see, 
Of the Creator's real Poetry, 
Than when we with attention look 
Upon the third day's volume of the Book? 
If we could open and intend our eye^ 
We ally like Moses, should espy 
EvWt in a hush the radiant Deity, 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY, 75 

But we despise these, His inferior ways, 
(Though no less full of miracle and praise,) 
Upon the flowers of heaven we gaze, 
The stars of earth no wonder in us raise. 

When Boswell mentioned to Johnson the saying 
of Shenstone, that Pope had the art beyond any other 
writer of condensing sense, Johnson replied : " It is 
not true, sir ; there is more sense in a line of Cowley 
than in a page of Pope." He might, have enlarged 
this criticism in his Life of Cowley : other poets may 
be read ; he is to be studied. The multitude of his 
allusions cause a continual strain on the memory ; 
and the richness of his fancy blinds the reader to the 
strength of his intellect ; as in tropical woods the 
thickest trunk of the tree is hidden by the tall grass 
and plants, that climb up and encircle it. 

In Cowley, the feeling for gardens, trees, and 
fountains, was natural and sincere. He was one 

— whose heart the holy forms 
Of young imagination have kept pure. 

But it is worth remarking, that the complaint of his 
touching line — 

Business, that contradiction of my fate, 



76 JOURNAL OF 



was breathed long before by Bacon. — [De Aug. Sci., 
I. viii. c. 3.) 

By the side of Cowley, Bolingbroke looks like 
Fiction holding the hand of Truth ; upon his lips, 
affection for the country was a sigh after flowers upon 
the stage. However, into woods and fields he went — 
everything was to be rural ; the walls of his house 
were painted with implements of husbandry, done in 
black crayon. ^'I am in my farm," he wrote to Swift; 
" and here I shoot strong and tenacious roots. I have 
caught hold of the earth, to use a gardener's phrase, 
and neither my friends nor my enemies will find it an 
easy matter to transplant me again." Is it ungener- 
ous to couple with Bolingbroke's affected love of 
gardens, the delight of Walpole in planting beeches 
and chestnuts at Houghton ? " My flatterers," he 
wrote to General Churchill, '• are mutes ; they will 
not lie. I, in return, with sincerity admire them ; 
and have as many beauties about me as fill up all my 
hours without dangling ; and no disgrace attends me 
from the age of sixty-seven." There is, truly, a forti- 
tude to be learned of that schoolmistress whom God 
employs to guide His children towards Himself — a 
high and noble sense of the soul's dignity, which 
makes it her privilege — 

Througli all the years of this our life, to lead 
From joy to joy ; for she can so inform 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTPwY. 77 

The mind tliat is within iis, so impress 
With quietness and beaut j, and so feed 
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, 
Eash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life, 
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings. 

But tbis wisdom is not taught in the academy of 
the Infidel, or the Plotter. 

My notes on gardens have swelled into an essay ; 
but I must say one word on their relationship to the 
pencil. Among ourselves, landscape gardening is 
confined within narrow boundaries. Few parts of 
England furnish materials for representing the pic- 
tures of S. Rosa, Claude, and the Poussins. Occa- 
sional situations may give the scenes of Ruysdael, 
Berghem, and Pinaker ; while Hobbema, Waterloo, 
and A. Vandervelt can be copied wherever trees, 
lanes, and water are found. Walpole included 
Claude in the list, but we have neither his architec- 
ture nor sunshine. 

May 16th. — I called in the other day a little 
debt that has been owing, for a long time, from Mr. 
Rogers to Bishop Warburton. This morning I came 
upon another, which ought to stand in the name of 



78 JOURNAL OP 

the great poetical ca^:)italist of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. Mr. Rogers, in his delightful fragment, Human 
Life, portrays the joyous indolence that sometimes 
creeps over us in youth, when there is balm in the 
blood as well as in the air : — 

Yet, all forgot, how oft the eyelids close, 

And from the slack hand drops the gathered rose ! 

The last is a most exquisite line, altogether gold- 
en, but melted from Milton's ore ; as may be seen by 
turning to the ninth book of Paradise Lost. Adam^ 
waiting the return of Eve, 

— had wove 
Of choicest flowers a garland to adorn 
Her tresses, and her rural labours crown ; 

at length, weary of suspense, wondering at her long 
stay, and with a foreboding at his heart of coming 
evil, he goes forth in search of her, and meets her re- 
turning from the Tree of Knowledge, with a bough 
of fruit in her hand. Eve anticipates his questions 
by relating the history of her temptation. Adam 
shrinks back in astonishment and horror — 

From his slack hand the garland wreath'd for Eve 
Down droptf and all the faded roses shed. 



SUMMEP^ TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 79 



Here, as in a verse of Mr. Rogers previously quoted, 
the elegance of the application lends a secondary 
kind of originality to the borrower. La Bruyere 
acutely remarked of Boileau, whose imitations are 
numerous, that he seemed to create the thoughts of 
other people— so ingenious are the turns which he 
gives to a simile or expression. He steals the metal, 
hut the superscription is his own. We may never 
look upon a writer, worthy of fame, and owing nothing 
to his ancestors. To speak in the unimprovable lan- 
guage of Dryden — " We shall track him everywhere 
in the snow of the ancients." 

May 17th. — In the history of art, we meet with a 
small but ingenious band of men who are known as 
flower-painters. The garden is their studio, and tu- 
lips, or roses, are their favourite sitters. Sometimes 
the floral features and charms are transferred with 
the dewy gracefulness of life. The pencil catches the 
orchard-bloom from the sunniest wall. Among Eng- 
lish poets, one has produced pen-and-ink sketches of 
rare brilliancy ; I refer to Darwin. He was not only, 
in the compliment of Cowper, the harmonist of Flora's 
court, but her artist in ordinary. His descriptions 
sparkle with dust of gold. The finger seems to rub 
it off the page, like crimson-meal from the wings of 
the butterfly. 



80 JOURNAL OF 



But flower-painting in words has never become a 
distinct branch of poetic art, every master of language 
having in some measure cultivated it. Shakspeare 
scattered his golden violets over the hearse of tragedy ; 
Spenser rejoiced in lilies ; Milton in all trees, leaves, 
and perfumes ; Thomson found words of many colours 
for the weeds and flowers of hedge-rows ; Cowper^s 
fancy brightened as he lingered under the woodbinej 
or glittering branches of laburnum. 

" I have some favourite flowers in spring," Burns 
wrote to a friend, ^^ among which are the mountain- 
daisy, harebell, and fox-glove ; the wild brier-rose, and 
budding and hoary hawthorn, I view and hang over 
with peculiar delight." And so he sang in his sweet 
pastoral verses — 

Their groves o' sweet myrtle let foreign lands reckon, 
Where bright beaming summers exalt the perfume ; 
• Far dearer to me yon lone glen o' green bracken, 
Wi' the bm'n stealing under the lang yellow broom. 

Far dearer to me yon humble broom bowers, 

Where the blue-bell and go wan lurk lowly unseen. 

Campbell could read a landscape in the mild looks 
of the primrose ; and Wordsworth's affection for the 
daisy is quite characteristic of his poetry. Perhaps 
the following are two of the most charming flower- 
pieces in our language : — 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 



81 



Thomson. 

Fair handed spring unbosoms 
ev'iy grace, 

Throws out the snowdrop and 
the crocus first, 

The daisy, primrose, violet 
darkly blue, 

And polyanthus of unnum- 
bered dyes ; 

The yellow wallflower stain'd 
with iron brown, 

And lavish stock that scents 
the garden round ; 

From the soft wing of vernal 
breezes shed 

Anemones ; auriculas enrich'd 

With shining meal o'er all 
their velvet leaves, 

And full ranunculus of glow- 
ing red ; 

Then comes the tulip race, 
where Beauty plays 

Her idle freaks ; from family 
diffused 

To family, as flies the feather- 
ing dust, 

The varied colours run. 

— ^Hyacinths of purest vir- 
gin white, 

4* 



COWPER. 

— Laburnum rich 

In streaming gold; syringa 
ivory pure ; 

The scented and the scentless 
rose : this red, 

And of an humbler growth; 
the other, tall, 

And throwing up into the 
darkest gloom 

Of neighboring cypress, or 
more sable yew, 

Her silver globes, light as the 
foamy surf, 

That the wind severs from the 
broken wave. 

The lilac, various in array, 
now white, 

Now sanguine, and her beau- 
teous head now set 

With purple spikes pyramid- 
al, as if 

Studious of ornament; yet 
unresolved 

Which hue she most approv- 
ed, she chose them all. 

Copious of flowers, the wood- 
bine pale and wan— 



82 



JOURNAL OF 



Thomson. 

Low bent and blushing in- 
ward ; nor jonquils, 

Of potent fragrance ; nor nar- 
cissus fair, 

As o'er the fabled fountain 
hanging still ; 

Nor broad carnations, nor gay 
spotted pinks ; 

Nor shower'd from every bush 
the damask rose. 



COWPER. 

Hypericum all bloom, so thick 

a swarm 
Of flowers like flies clothing 

her slender rods, 
That scarce a leaf appears. 
Althaea with the purple eye. 



The auricula was brought to our sheltered lawns 
from the snowy moss of the Swiss Alps. Of the ra- 
nunculus an anecdote is told by the traveller Tourne- 
fort: — Mahomet IV. , with a passion for the chase, 
combined a love of flowers, and particularly of the 
ranunculus. His vizir, the Casa Mustapha of the 
siege of Vienna, anxious to wean his master from the 
more hazardous amusement, subjected the empire to a 
horticultural inquisition. Every Pacha was ordered 
to send seeds and roots of the finest species of the 
Sultan's favourite to Constantinople. Accordingly, the 
secluded courts of the seraglio soon began to shine 
with the richest flowers from Cyprus, Aleppo, and 
Smyrna. In process of time, the ambassadors at the 
Turkish court procured specimens for their respective 
sovereigns, and the ranunculus reared its head in all 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 83 

the royal gardens of Europe. Next to the rose, it 
seems to be the most expansive name in botany. Of 
one sortj florists reckon eight hundred varieties. But 
our obligations to the East are not limited to the ra- 
nunculus; the tuber rose and lily reached us from 
India and Persia towards the close of the sixteenth 
century. Beckman thinks that the taste for flowers 
travelled into Europe from the same countries. The 
tulip first opened its gorgeous eyes in a Turkish gar- 
den. It grows wild in the Levant. 

May 20th. — The Eton edition of Gray, charming- 
ly illustrated and edited, overlooks, I think, one or 
two annotations worthy of insertion. A visitor to 
Wales, in the early part of the present century, ob- 
jected to the description, in the Bard, of the ^^ foam- 
ing Conway." And having imagined an error, he 
suggests this occasion of it : — Gray probably supposed 
the Conway to resemble the mountain torrents of 
Wales, of which the course is troubled and impetuous, 
although observation would have informed him that 
the Conway flows in a tranquil current through the 
valley. This is sufficiently well. But Gray knew the 
Conway and its character. He chose a moment of 
tempest for the action of the Ode, and treated the 
river with poetic liberty. The storm lashed the water 



84 JOURNAL OF 



into foam, and tlie lioary hair of tlie minstrel, stand- 
ing upon the rock — 

Streamed like a meteor to the troubled air. 

The scene is full of agitation and dismay. Titian's 
noble landscape of St. Peter the Martyr is recalled to 
the mind. The sudden gush of wind, tossing out the 
robe of the Dominican, corresponds with the tumultu- 
ous attitude of the poet. 

Bishop Percy has been more justly accused of a 
mistake like that imputed to Gray. In the romance 
of Don Alonzo de Aguilar, contained in the Reliques^ 
he translates Rio Verde, '^ gentle river ;" but Swin- 
burne showed that Green River is as much the name 
of the water where the skirmish happened, as Black- 
wall is of the reach of the Thames where people go to 
eat whitebait. 

A topographical error has been pointed out in a 
writer whose minute truthfulness of local description 
is generally surprising. At the western extremity of 
the Gulf of Naples are two islands, Procida and 
Ischia, of which the second is rocky, appearing to rise 
up in a cone from the lowlands of the former. Yet 
Virgil, who was familiar with the scenery as Johnson 
with the flow of Fleet Street, reverses or transposes 
the characteristic epithet. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 85 

May 22d. — Johnson and Thomson had two feel- 
ings in common — a passion for wall-fruit and lying in 
bed. The philosopher ate seven or eight large 
peaches before breakfast, and renewed the acquaint- 
ance at dinner with equal enthusiasm. He said that 
once in his life, at Ormberslej, the seat of Lord San- 
dys, he had enough fruit. The poet sketches himself 
in Aittumn^ (677 ;) 

Here as I steal along the sunny wall, 
Where Autumn basks with fruit empurpled deep, 
My pleasing theme continual prompts my thought ; 
Presents the downy peach ; the shining plum ; 
The ruddy, fragrant nectarine ; and dark, 
Beneath his ample leaf, the luscious fig. 

There was, however, a refinement in Thomson's appe- 
tite quite unknown to his critic. He delighted to 
draw down the rich plum, with the blue on it, into his 
mouth without the help of his hands, which hung list- 
lessly in his pockets. Johnson's love of plums be- 
trayed him into an amusing extravagance. When he 
was in the Isle of Skye, the conversation turning on 
the advantage of wearing linen, he said that the juice 
from a plum-tree on the fingers was not disagreeable, 
because it was a vegetable substance. 

The other coincidence was in panegyrics of earlv 
rising : "I tell all young people," wrote Johnson 



86 JOURNAL OF 



" and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who 
does not rise early will ever do any good." Mean- 
while, in his diary, April, 1765, he confesses a general 
habit of lying in bed until two o'clock in the after- 
noon. The poet's theory and practice were not closer. 
His famous apostrophe — 

Falsely luxurious, will not man awake! 

would have startled nobody more than his own ser- 
vant. Good Mrs. Carter — skilful in translating 
Epictetus, and making a pudding, and who lived to 
the verge of ninety years — always rose at six, and 
left a pleasant admonition for sleepy readers :— 

The poets will tell you a deal of Aurora, 
And how much she improves all the beauties of Flora; 
Though you need believe neither the poets nor me, 
But convince your own senses, and get up and see. 

May 25th. — I have been impressed by a remark 
of Professor Wilson, in Mill's History of India, that 
people who declaim against the tyranny of caste, 
should recollect its compensations. The caution need 
not be limited to the Hindus. Whatever be the va- 
rieties of human states and fortunes, some delicate 
turn of the balance makes them equal. The scale is 
in the hand of God. The thrush sings in the cot- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 87 

tager's garden, and the skeleton hangs behind the gold 
tapestry. Even the mute creation clears up dark 
passages in the economy of the intellectual. For one 
gift bestowed, another is taken away. The bird of 
paradise has coarse legs. The eye of the bat is too 
weak for the gloom it inhabits ; therefore the sense 
of touch is quickened ; it sees with its feet, and easi- 
ly and safely guides itself in the swiftest flight. The 
sloth has a similar provision. Look at it on the 
ground, and you wonder at the grotesque freaks of 
nature ; but follow it up a tree ; watch it suspending 
its body by the hooked toes, and swinging from bough 
to bough, and you perceive its organization to be 
exactly suited to its wants. Paley notices the same 
principle of compensation in the elephant and crane. 
The short unbending neck of the first receives a 
remedy in the flexible trunk ; the long legs of the 
second enable it to wade where the structure of its 
feet prevents it from swimming. 

The changes of light and shade are tempered to 
insect sensibility. In the deserts of the Torrid Zone, 
the setting sun calls up myriads of little creatures, 
that would perish in its full brightness ; while, in the 
wintry solitudes of the north, sunset is the signal for 
repose. The lesson of compensation is taught by 
the humming of flies along the hedges. The flutterer 
of a day has no reason to complain of the shortness 



88 JOURNAL OF 



of its life. It was a thought of Malebranche, that 
the ephemera may regard a minute as we look upon 
a year. The delusion is its recompense. Mr. Lan- 
dor touches this subject very beautifully in his Ima- 
ginary Conversation between Lord Brooke and Sir 
Philip Sidney. The former remarks, under an oak 
at Penshurstj " What a hum of satisfaction in Grod's 
creatures ! How is it the smallest do seem the hap- 
piest ?" And his friend answers him : " Compensa- 
tion for their weakness and their fears: compensation 
for the shortness of their existence. Their spirits 
mount upon the sunbeam above the eagle ; they have 
more enjoyment in their one summer than the ele- 
phant in his century." 

And if we turn to the history and fortunes of men, 
a long series of balances keeps opening on the eye. 
The ear alone might be a motto for an essay. In 
South America, a cicada is heard a mile ; a man only 
a few yards. Kirby has calculated that, if the voice 
increased in volume proportionably to the size of the 
body, it would resound over the world. Every inch 
must deepen the thunder ; and two giants might con- 
verse with ease from the North Pole and the Ganges. 
The slightest enlargement of stature would be watched 
with apprehension ; and an island with one man of 
seven feet in it be altogether uninhabitable. Pope 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 89 

did not forget this providential adaptation of the or- 
gan to happiness : — 

If JiTature thundered in his opening ears, 
And stunn'd him with the music of the spheres, 
How would he wish that Heaven had left him still 
The whispering zephyr and the purling rill. 

Who will complain that he is more inaudible than the 
grasshopper ? 

Man has another compensation in the fineness of 
his ear. Dugald Stewart remarked of the warbling 
of birds, that it gives pleasure to none of the quadru- 
peds ; nor is it even certain if the music of one spe- 
cies gratifies another. Who ever heard a sparrow 
pause in his impertinent chirp, because a lark sprang 
wavering into song above his head? Against this 
argument it has been objected, that the canary often 
learns the nightingale's notes ; that young birds adopt 
the song of their foster-parent ; and that the jay has 
been heard to warble the robin's tune, which it had 
learned entirely by its own ear, and love of music. 
These examples do not refute the saying of the philo- 
sopher. In certain birds imitation is an instinct. 
The question must be decided upon the general prin- 
ciples of observation. If an exquisite singer were 
suddenly, in the midst of the most ignorant rustics, 
to burst into the full swell and cadence of harmony, 



90 JOURNAL OP 



there would be a husli of wonder and delight. But 
who supposes the owl to consider its hooting less 
agreeable than the chant of the nightingale ? 

We have sublimer illustrations of the theory. 

The Bible is a history of compensation. The 
prophecies of the New Covenant were uttered in sea- 
sons of depression— at the fall of Adam, the separa- 
tion of Abraham, the bondage of Israel, and the giv- 
ing of the law by Moses, the captivity of Babylon. 
Cloud and rainbow appear together. There is wis- 
dom in the saying of Feltham, that the whole creation 
is kept in order by discord, and that vicissitude main- 
tains the world. Many evils bring many blessings. 
Manna drops in the wilderness — corn grows in Ca- 
naan. Barely two afflictions, or two trials, console 
or trouble us at the same time. Human life is the 
Prophet's declaration drawn out into examples: — 
" God stayeth his rough wind in the day of his 
east loindP 

And one curious and beautiful feature of the Di- 
vine scheme of compensation is seen in its changing 
our sorrows into instruments and channels of joy and 
comfort. The curtained chamber of sickness sows 
the barren field with flowers. A sick man seated in 
his garden, or tottering down a green lane for a few 
minutes, might suppose himself transported into the 
morning and sunlight of creation : — 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 91 

The common air, the earth, the skies, 
To him are opening Paradise. 

Plato relates that Socrates, on the day of his 
death, being in the company of his disciples, began to 
rub his leg, which had been galled by the chain, and 
mentioned the pleasurable sensation in the released 
member. The Greek prison represents the world ; 
the philosopher, the Christian ; the fetters, the calam- 
ities of life. When one of these is loosened, the soul 
experiences a feeling of delight. It is the leg of 
Socrates unchained. The iron enters into the soul, 
and afterwards the wound is healed. St. Paul told 
the Corinthians, that when he came to Macedonia his 
flesh had no rest ; without, were fightings ; within, 
were fears ; but God comforted him by " the coming 
of Titus." So it is ever. 

The future of a man is his recompense ; some- 
thing is promised which he desired ; or something is 
withdrawn of which he complained. Hope is the 
compendium of compensation. The Eskino, who num- 
bers among his pleasures a plank of a tree, cast by 
the ocean currents on his desolate shores, sees in the 
moon plains overshadowed by majestic forests ; the 
Indian of the Oroonoko expects to find in the same 
luminary green and boundless savannas, where people 
are never stung by mosquitoes. Thus the chain of 
compensation encircles the world. 



92 JOURNAL OF 



May 28tli. — Much amused with Fortune's Wander- 
ing in China, the book for a wet day in the country. 
He has something to say, and says it. Gutzlaff had 
complained of the ill-behaviour of the Chinese in their 
temples ; the official persons taking no interest in the 
religious ceremonies, but staring at the European 
strangers. Fortune doubts the general truth of the 
story, and recommends us to make a corresponding 
experiment in England. Let me sketch a scene. 
While the village choir is scraping into tune, the bas- 
soon grumbles, and the flute breathes its first scream, 
let the church-doors open, and display, leisurely pacing 
up the chancel, and under the afi*righted eyes of the 
clerk, a small-footed lady, with eyes to match, from 
Pekin ; or a mandarin, a peacock-feather mounted in 
his hat, wearing a purple spencer embroidered with 
gold, a rosary of stones and coral round his neck, and 
a long tail, exquisitely braided, dangling down his 
shoulders. Imagine the apparition to seat himself in 
the pew of the squire ; and then, by way of refresh- 
ment, to draw from the embroidered purse, always 
suspended at the girdle, a snuff-bottle of porcelain or 
coloured glass, and lay a small portion of fragrant 
dust in the left hand, at the lower joint of the thumb. 
After these preliminaries, suppose him, with that in- 
ward sense of merit, which may be recognised even iu 
our parochial snuff-takers, to lift the pinch to his 



SUMMEPx. TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 93 

nose. Where have been the eyes of the congregation 
during these mystic ceremonies !■ I shall not presume 
to conjecture. 

In truth, appearances are not always to be trusted. 
A recent traveller in Canada was on a hunting-excur- 
sion with a party of Indians ; before retiring to sleep, 
all knelt in prayer, rosary in hand. But the dogs, 
which, to increase their fierceness, had been kept fast- 
ing, came prowling into the cabin ; and one happened 
to touch the heel of the Indian whose look was the 
devoutest and most self-absorbed. He immediately 
turned round to eject the intruder ; and showering on 
him a volley of French imprecations, finally drove him 
out with circumstances of peculiar indignity. Having 
accomplished this feat, he took a long pull at his pipe, 
and resumed his prayers. 

June 1st. — One seldom reads Fontenelle in these 
swarming book-days ; but what a charm there is in his 
works ! His scientific portraits are so simple and 
life-like ; and then how tasteful are the frames — never 
gaudy, but setting off the complexion. Voltaire said 
that the ignorant understood, and the learned admired 
him. No French author has introduced more elegant 
turns of speech, or embellished a narrative with grace- 
fuller images. His Eloges are models in their way. 
Speaking of the long illness of Malebranche, he calls 



94 JOURNAL OF 



him a calm spectator of his own death. The sketch 
of Leibnitz contains two or three choice touches. He 
says that to appreciate the extent of the philosopher's 
genius, we must '^ decompose his character," and sur- 
vey it in its elements. In this Eloge has been dis- 
covered the original of a very beautiful image of 
modern geology^ — '' Des coquillages petrifies dans les 
terres, des pierres oil se trouvent des empreintes de 
poissons, ou de plantes, et meme de poissons et de 
plantes, qui ne sont point du pays ; Medailles incon- 
testables du DelugeJ^ I met with an early trace of 
the metaphor in a letter from Henry Baker, the natu- 
ralist, to Dr. Doddridge : "And as ancient coins and 
medals struck by mighty princes, in remembrance of 
their exploits, are highly valued as evidences of such 
facts, no less ought these fossil marine bodies to be 
considered medals of the Almighty^ f^^^y proving 
the desolation he has formerly brought upon the 
earth." 

But, with all his graces, Fontenelle was a French- 
man. He often flutters into epigram ; and, with the 
ingenuity of our own Cowley, shares his sparkling 
conceits and inverted fancies ; and, like him, he soft- 
ened the ruggedest tempers. He won the kind looks 
of Warburton, who admired his prose comedies, which 
the author intended for a posthumous appearance. 
But, as he pleasantly observes, his length of life — he 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 95 

almost completed a century — having quite exhausted 
his patience, he determined to wait no longer, and re- 
lieved his executors of the publication by undertaking 
it himself. 

June 3rd. — Standing under this lime-tree, every 
bough utters its own sermon. The shadowy motion 
on the grass preaches. In the world nothing is still. 
The earth moves ; small things and great obey the 
law ; and this chequered turf, to which I am giving a 
fainter green with the pressure of my feet, goes round 
the sun as swiftly as the vast forests of America. 

The elements are always changing. So is society. 
A merchant, all his speculations hardened into gold, 
swells up a lord ; or, blown into air, disappears in 
smoke. Nothing but the Christian mind is unaffected 
by this circular motion, fluidity, and explosion. I 
recollect an illustration in a black folio of the seven- 
teenth century, rich as usual in conceits, controversy, 
grandeur, and Greek : As a watch, though tossed up 
and down by the agitation of him who carries it, does 
not, on that account, undergo any perturbation or dis- 
order in the working of the spring and wheels within, 
so the true Christian heart, however shaken by the 
joltings it meets with in the pressure and tumult of 
the world, suffers no derangement in the adjustment 



96 , JOURNAL OF 



and action of its machinery. The hand still points 
to eternity. 

June 5th. — There is one passage in Langhorne 
so immeasurably superior to any other in his works, 
that the reader is disposed to transfer Gray's doubt, 
whether " Nugent wrote his own ode." It occurs in 
the Country Justice, at the close of an appeal on be- 
half of unfortunate vagrants : — 

Perhaps on some inhospitable shore. 
The houseless wretch a widow'd parent bore, 
Who then no more by golden prospects led, 
Of the poor Indian begg'd a leafy bed. 
Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain. 
Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain ; 
Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolv'd in dew; 
The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 
Gave the sad presage of his futm-e years, 
The child of misery baptized in tears. 

The last line is one of the most pathetic in poet- 
ry. In the Jesuit Bonhour's collection of Thoughts 
from the Fathers, I found the following apostrophe of 
St. Leon : " Heureux vos larines. saint Apostre, qui, 
pour effacer le peche que vous commistes en renon- 
eeant votre Maitre, eurent la vertu d'un sacre bap- 
tisme^ Donne (Serm. cxxxi.) has the same image: 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 97 

" The tears themselves shall be the sign ; the tears 
shall be ambassadonrs ^^ PJ] ^ present gladness shall 
consecrate your sorrow, and tears shall baptize and 
give a neiv name to your passion P The coincidence 
deserves notice. 

A pleasant literary anecdote is connected with 
these verses. On one occasion, Walter Scott, a lad 
of fifteen, was in the company of Burns, at Edin- 
burgh. There happened to be in the room a print by 
Bunbury, representing a soldier lying dead on the 
snow, his dog sitting on one side, and his widow, with 
a child in her arms, on the other. The lines of Lang- 
horne were written beneath. Burns shed tears at 
the print, and inquired after the author of the in- 
scription. Scott was the only person who knew his 
name ; he whispered it to a friend, who told it to 
Burns ; and he rewarded the future minstrel of Scot- 
land " with a look and a word," which in days of 
glory and fame were remembered with pride. 

The name of Langhorne was faintly revived by 
the publication of Hannah More's Memoirs ; but he 
is chiefly known in connexion with those mightier 
spirits, to whose youthful ears his musical rhymes 
were pleasing. His flute had two or three harmoni- 
ous notes ; and he was one of the earliest embellish- 
ers of " the short and simple annals of the poor," 



.1 



98 JOURNAL OF 



June 7th. — Glanced at the new letters of Horace 
Walpole to Lady Ossory, and notice the strange like- 
ness to Grray in manner and expression, extending 
even to phrases and idioms. The affectation of both 
is very amusing, Walpole being the more manly. "' I 
went the other day," he wrote, " to Scarlet's, to buy 
green spectacles ; he was mighty assiduous to give 
me a pair that would not tumble my hair. ^ Lord, 
sir,' said I, ' when one is come to wear spectacles, 
what signifies how one looks ?' " Gray underwent 
great annoyance on this very account. A concealed 
double eyeglass was the nearest approach to spectacles 
that his delicacy could endure. One of the most dis- 
agreeable features of the poet is a bantering confusion 
of serious- and trifling things. He probably caught 
the disease from his friend, who told Cole that he 
would not give threepence for Newton's work on the 
Prophecies. 

The literary character of Walpole has been drawn 
by himself in a few words : " I am a composition of 
Anthony Wood, and Madame Danoi the fairy-tale 
writer." This is true. He had much of the minute 
learning, but none of the dust of the antiquary. He 
always appears to us intellectually as he did to Han- 
nah More bodily, in a primrose suit and silk stockings. 
His apartments are crowded with rubbish, but he 
hangs some little genre piece in the corner. No writer 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 99 

of his time presents such curious happinesses of 
phrase. " Pictures are but the scenery of devotion ;" 
Versailles is " a lumber of littleness." I admire, but 
cannot love him. Himself of the earth, every word 
and thought smell of it. His irreligion is not very 
obtrusive. He was a well-dressed infidel, of refined 
manners ; a kind of English Voltaire, abridged and 
lettered, with gilt leaves, and elegantly tooled. 

June 9th. — Stood on the root-bridge in the fading 
lights of evening, and listened with feelings of pensive 
sadness to the chimes from Aberleigh. Just one year 
ago, in the " leafy month of June," I heard the same 
sounds of mirth and melancholy, and said then, as 
now — 

How soft the music of tliose village bells, 
Falling at intervals upon the ear 
In cadence sweet. 

There is solemn and touching truth in the remark 
of Pope, that every year carries away something be- 
loved and precious ; not destroying or efiacing, but 
removing it into a soft and visionary twilight. Pous- 
sin's picture of a tomb in Arcadia is the last year in 
a parable. 

It is in the nature of bells to bring out this tone 



f 

^-j© 



100 JOURNAL OF 



of mournfulness. Every chime has its connecting 
toll. Each week locks the gate of its predecessor, 
and keeps the key. Thus it becomes a monument 
which the old sexton Time watches over. Beautiful 
is it J indeed, when studded with the rich jewels of 
wise hours and holy minutes ! Most magnificent of 
sepulchres ! The dust of our own creations — our 
hopes, thoughts, virtues, and sins — is to us the costli- 
est deposit in the burial ground of the world. How 
appalling would be the resurrection of a year, month, 
or week, with the secret history of every man open in 
its hand — a diary of fiame, to be read by its own 
glare ! If childhood could be the granary of youth, 
youth of manhood, manhood of old age — if the year 
gone could be continually brought back to cherish, 
strengthen, and support the year coming ; — Then 
might the Grrecian story of filial piety receive a new 
and nobler fulfilment — in the wasted virtue of man- 
hood, invigorated by the life-giving current of our 
youth ; in the feebleness and exhaustion of the parent, 
renewed by the glowing bosom of the child ! 

The steeple of Aberleigh teaches me a great lesson 
— to strengthen any good disposition into a habit. 
The relationship between the two is close and beauti- 
ful. Habits are the daughters of action, but they 
nurse their mothers, and give birth to daughters after 
her image, more lovely and prosperous. The saying 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRQ. 101 

is Jeremy Taylor's. The use of our time, then, is the 
criterion of our condition, and our wages will be paid 
by the clock. Sterne, whose life was only a journey 
of sentiment, has nevertheless made a wise remark in 
one of his gossiping letters : " If you adopt the rule 
of writing every evening your remarks on the past 
day, it will be a kind of tete-a-tete between you and 
yourself, wherein you may sometimes become your 
own monitor." 

This " gradual dusky veil" of evening reminds me 
that the road of time has taken a new turn. Let me 
recollect the admonition of a famous man, that the 
humblest persons are bound to give an account of 
their leisure ; and, in the midst of solitude, to be of 
some use to society. This meditation on a woodland 
bridge ought not to be fruitless. The spare minutes 
of a year are mighty labourers, if kept to their work. 
They overthrow, and build up ; dig, or empty. There 
is a tradition in Barbary that the sea was once ab- 
sorbed by ants. 

The result of toil may not appear : no pyramid 
may rise under the busy labour of our swarming 
thoughts. Be not cast down. We read of those who 
had watched all night, 'Hhat as soon as they were 
come to land, they saw a fire of coals, and fish laid 
thereon, and bread." It was a lone and dreary shore; 
yet an unexpected flame cheered, and a strange Visi- 



102 JOUPuNAL OF 



tor walked along it. The chimes of ages promise the 
same food and light to me. In this dark, troubled 
sea of life, I may row up and down all night and 
catch nothing ; but at last the net will be let down 
for a great draught. A clear fire burns, and a rich 
supper is spread along the calm shore of the future. 
The haven shines in the distance. Happy ! if I leave 
behind me the short epitaph — 

Proved by the ends of being, to have been I 

June 13th. — Began Mr. Keble's Latin lectures, 
the fruit of his professorship at Oxford. He discov- 
ers an interesting variety of expression in the rural 
temper of Lucretius and Virgil ; one retiring to in- 
vestigate the mysteries, the other to enjoy the beau- 
ties of nature. The first lifting her veil as an anato- 
mist ; the second, as a lover. Virgil might desire to 
imitate, as he certainly wished to honour, the genius 
of his predecessor ; but he left his difficult paths. He 
felt that, for his own hand, sweeter flowers, and of 
brighter colours, grew in the sheltered recesses of the 
hills. 

It seems to be ascertained that, in the year in 
which Lucretius died at Athens, Virgil, assuming the 
Virile Toga, quitted Cremona for Rome. The mel- 
ancholy fate of his contemporary could not but touch 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 103 

his heart, and the allusion to suicide in the sixth book 
of the ^neid breathes the pathos of affection ; nor 
may it be unjust to discover, in the sunnier tone of 
Virgil's colouring, and the general gaiety of his man- 
ner, a designed antidote for the gloom and austerity 
of his rival in the art. 

A particular charm of Virgil's poetry resides in 
this engaging freshness and buoyancy, connected, as 
they are, with tender recollections of early life. He 
imparts the feeling to the characters of his poem. 
The wounded soldier lifts his closing eyes to heaven, 
and expires with the remembrance of Argos at his 
heart. 

Virgil continually alludes to familiar places — Lu- 
cretius, never. Mr. Keble thinks that the most dili- 
gent eye would be unable to discover in his poetry the 
name of one mountain, or river, introduced by the im- 
pulse of love and memory. Virgil, on the contrary, 
seeks to revive his associations. Mantua and Cre- 
mona supply his landscapes. The neighbouring 
streams of Mincius, Athesis, and Eridanus, and the 
remote summits of the Alps and Apennines blend, 
however unconsciously, with every scene. Mr. Keble 
places the attraction of the first and ninth Bucolics 
in their relationship to the poet's haunts. He ven- 
tures to pour the beloved Eridanus into the laurels of 
Elysium. In like manner, he compares j^neas, in his 



104 JOURNAL OF 



last conflict, to the crest of the Apennines, over which 
he had so often seen the sun go down from the green 
and pastoral dwelling of his youth. 

Lucretius, as a painter of word-landscape, appears 
to excel in his air of mystery, and in the various acci- 
dents of light. In the second quality, he is equalled 
hy Virgil, Dante, and our own Spenser ; but in the 
first, the Commedia of the Florentine affords the only 
parallel, in its dim windings of forest-paths, that send 
a " sleepy horror through the blood." 

The landscapes of Virgil may be reflected in the 
blue skies, unshaken leaves, sunny turf, and golden 
waters of Claude ; while the dark perspective and 
oracular branches of Lucretius must be sought in the 
sombre masses and awful twilight of Poussin. Those 
trees, stretching into spectral shade, thrill the beholder 
with some dreadful catastrophe working out in the 
gloom. I may mention "Abraham journeying to sac- 
rifice his son," in our National Gallery, as embodying 
the tone of a Lucretian picture. With regard to the 
delightful descriptions of light, under different mani- 
festations, we are to remember that the philosophy 
and temper of Lucretius led him to contemplate the 
atmospheric changes with a lingering eye : to watch 
the villager, from blue hamlet in the vine-covered hills, 
going forth to his work ; or, in the shade of departing 
day— 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 105 

The lowing herds wind slowly o'er the lea. 

His sun and cloud scenery is exquisite. It reminds 
me of Fuseli's praise of Wilson — that having observed 
nature in all her aspects, he had a separate and fitting 
touch for each : and that, in effects of dewy freshness, 
and warm morning and silent evening lights, few have 
equalled, and fewer excelled him. 

June 18. — Adam Smith draws an agreeable por- 
trait of his friend Hume ; but constant smoothness 
and ease of character are neither winning nor truth- 
ful — like Cowper's ice-palace, it smiles^ and it is cold. 
In great men, the mingling beam and gloom of mirth- 
fulness and melancholy compose a mellow twilight of 
feeling far more delightful. " Is not that naivete and 
good humour which his friends celebrate in him," 
Gray asked Beattie, " owing to this — that he has con- 
tinued all his days an infant, but one who has unhap- 
pily been taught to read and write ?" No zeal, no 
virtue, no hope ; what a character ! Warburton 
showed his resemblance to Bolingbroke. In fact, 
Hume took possession of the atheistical house which 
Pope's friend had erected ; and, possessing more taste 
and caution, he fitted it up to receive the genteel fam- 
ilies of unbelief He was a '' decorator" of infidelity, 
and had a long run of patronage. Let us hope that 
he and his furniture are now going out of fashion. 
.5^ 



106 JOURNAL OF 



June 20th. — Reading the Heart of Mid-Lothian 
this morningj I noticed a remarkable coincidence of 
thought with a splendid sentiment in the Essay on 
Man: 

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, 

A hero perish, or a sparrow fall. 

Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd. 

And now a bubble burst, and now a world. 

The passage of Scott occurs in the description of the 
storm which surprised Staunton and Butler, as they 
were crossing the Gare-loch. " There is something 
solemn in this delay of the storm/' said Sir George : 
" it seems as if it suspended its peal till it solemnized 
some important event in the world below." "Alas !" 
replied Butler, "what are we, that the laws of nature 
should correspond in their march with our ephemeral 
deeds or sufferings ! The clouds will burst when sur- 
charged with the electric fluid, whether a goat is fall- 
ing at that instant from the cliffs of Arran^ or a 
hero expiring on the field of battle he had wonV 
The melody of the prose, with its dying fall, is most 
grand and affecting. 

There is a little scene in the same story which 
always strikes me as exceedingly delicate and tender: 
I mean the meeting of the sisters in the Tolbooth:- — 
" The unglazed window of the miserable chamber was 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 107 

open, and the beams of a bright sun fell upon the bed 
where the sufferers were seated. With a gentleness 
that had something of reverence in it, Ratcliffe partly 
closed the shutter, and seemed thus to throw a veil 
over a scene so mournful." 

I remember an incident in the life of Swift that 
is not unworthy of being mentioned in connexion 
with Scott. Lady Ashburnham, daughter of the Duke 
of Ormond, was one of the Dean's favourites, and he 
appears to have lamented her death with real grief. 
His account of a visit to her bereaved father is given 
in a letter to Mrs. Dingley (Jan. 4, 1712): " He bore 
up as well as he could : but something happening ac- 
cidentally in discourse, the tears were just falling out 
of his eyes, and I looked off, to give him an opportu- 
nity (which he took) of wiping them with his hand- 
kerchief I never saw anything so moving, nor such 
a mixture of greatness of mind, and tenderness, and 
discretion." What a leveller the heart is ! The 
keeper of the Tolbooth closes the shutter, to conceal 
the anguish of the sisters ; and the biographer of 
Gulliver turns aside, that a father may dry his tears 
for a daughter. 

June 22nd. — This pleasant edition of Our Village 
ought to find its way into every parlour-window, and 
wherever there is hay-carrying, or Maying, or nutting, 



108 JOURNAL OF 



or other rural occupation and amusement. But to 
feel tlie full charm of the book, the reader should live 
in the country it describes : " This pretty Berkshire 
of ours, renowned for its pastoral villages, its pictu- 
resque interchange of common and woodland, and 
small enclosures divided by lanes, to which thick bor- 
ders of hedge-row timber give a character of deep and 
forest-like richness." And again : '^ This shady yet 
sunny Berkshire, where the scenery, without rising 
into grandeur, or breaking into wilderness, is so peace- 
ful, so cheerful, so varied, and so thoroughly English." 

Gray considered the four most beautiful counties 
in England to be those of Worcester, Shropshire, 
Gloucester, and Hereford ; to these he added Mon- 
mouth, in South Wales. One might have expected 
him to include Kent, of which he has given such 
charming sketches ; especially of its river-views, the 
Medway and shipping, with the sea breaking on the 
eye, and mingling its white sails and blue waters with 
the deeper and brighter green of the woods and corn. 

By way of contrast and shade, compare the coun- 
ties of Warwick, Northampton, Huntingdon, Cam- 
bridge, and Bedford. With the exception of Cam- 
bridgeshire, which, in its own '^ quiet ugliness," is un- 
approachable, Northampton has the least interest for 
the poet, painter, or admirer of scenery. Dr. Ar- 
nold's lamentation over his own nook in it is express 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 109 

ive ; no woodSj only one copse, no heath, no down, no 
rock, no ruin, no clear stream, and scarcely any flow- 
ers. It seems an image of cultivated desolation. 
Yet, out of the wilderness the meditative fancy of 
Clare gathered flowers, gentleness, and beauty. So 
just is the saying of Mr. Keble — 

Give true hearts but earth and sky, 
And some flowers to bloom and die ; 
Homely scenes and simple views, 
Lowly thoughts may best infuse. 

To certain minds, the absence of grandeur is a 
recommendation. Cowper, among the downs of Ear- 
tham, sighed for the grassy walks of Weston; and 
Constable, in the hills and solitudes of Westmoreland, 
felt a weight on his spirit. He looked around in vain 
for churches, farm-houses, or scattered hamlets, and 
considered flat, agricultural Suffolk to be a delight- 
fuller country for the artist. 

This feeling explains the remark of Schlegel, that 
a landscape-painter often finds the dullest spots the 
most suggestive. Little things make up the sweetest 
pictures. A group of cattle standing in shade on a 
dark hill, with a gleam of sun falling on clouds in the 
distance ; a heathery roadside ; an ivy -grown cottage 
at the end of a lane, running between hedges of brier- 



110 JOURNAL OF 



roses and lioney-suckle ; each furnishes subjects and 
food for the pencil. Give Ruysdael an old mill and 
two or three stunted trees, and see what he creates 
out of them. Commonest objects abound in the pic- 
turesque. The peacock yields to the wood-pigeon, and 
even the stag to the forest-donkey. Our own Gains- 
borough kept one constantly at hand, that he might 
introduce it in every variety of posture and colour. 

This naturalness — this dealing with every-day ap- 
pearances — is the charm of Miss Mitford's writings. 
Mabuse painted Eden with a sculptured fountain in 
the centre. In Our Village, nothing is out of place 
or concord. Oranges and palm-trees do not grow in 
its fields, and blue humming-birds are never caught in 
the hedges. It is a series of English scenes, with the 
dew on them. Of course, in a certain sense, they are 
dressed. The weakness of Crabbe lay in his literal- 
ness. His sketches are plagiarisms of Nature. He 
described a tree as Quintin Matsys painted a face. 
Miss Mitford has performed for her Berkshire hamlet 
what Cowper did for Weston. He called it the pret- 
tiest village in England, and made it to be so in his 
verse and prose. In his day it was pleasanter than 
in ours, because the little street of scattered houses 
was sheltered by trees. But the elements of beauty 
were few. A garden prospect of orchard bloom ; a 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. Ill 

lime-avenue ; one or two wood-paths breaking into 
grassy slopes — 

Within the twilight of their distant shade ; 

these were the brightest features of the poet's village. 
Fancy and love imparted the grace. 

An accomplished student of art has noticed this 
habit of rural describers, and commended it : " Nature 
is most defective in composition, and must be a little 
assisted." Claude's landscapes are illustrations of the 
remark. He refined and decorated reality, but with 
such consummate faithfulness and harmony of truth 
and combination, that the scene appears to change 
with the tone and influence of the hour when it is 
contemplated. Price assures us that he sometimes 
looked at a Claude, in the coming on of twilight, until 
the picture glimmered and died away into distance, 
like a real landscape in the fading hues of evening. 
This embellishment of woods and trees has been called 
the translation of landscape. We find it to have been 
largely practised by the old Masters. They seldom 
painted real scenes, except upon commission. They 
delighted, in the words of Sir George Beaumont, to 
exhibit what a country suggested, rather than what it 
comprised. Nature sat for her portrait, and they 
gave not only the colour but the expression of her 
eyes. 



112 JOURNAL OF 



It would be easy, as pleasant, to transfer from Our 
Village some exquisite examples of this theory. 

The author goes into the lanes and commons of 
the neighbourhood, coming home to revive and ar- 
range her pictures in the light of taste and memory, 
and then, in a sense not anticipated by Cowper — 

To lay the landscape on the snowy sheet. 

Numberless passages crowd on the pen ; but I would 
mention particularly her own territory — " the pride of 
my heart and the delight of my eyes, my garden ;" 
the house "like a bird-cage, just fit to hang on a 
tree ;" a broken hedge-row, with its mosaic of flower- 
ing weeds and mosses ; the green hollow of little 
hills, with blossoming broom, which we call a dell ; or 
the wood, beginning to show on the reddening bush 
and spotted sycamore, the kindling colours of autumn. 
As to the figures — actors in the country drama — drop 
into Our Village wherever you please, you cannot lose 
your way. Look over the hedge at Jem and Mabel 
wheat-hoeing ; talk to Mat. Shore, the blind gardener, 
about his tulips ; hearken to little Walter singing to 
himself in the corn-field ; or, above and before all, 
love and prize sweet, affectionate, blind Jessy Lucas. 
A beauty in these sketches ought to be carefully 
observed — their human interest. We are not enclosed 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 113 

in a wide landscape, without life, or work, or joy in it. 
It breathes and lives. The plough moves in the fur- 
row, the sickle flashes among the corn, the flail re- 
sounds at the barn-door, there is laughter under the 
hawthorn, and a merry group of children dances out 
from those clustering elm-trees. In this agreeable 
feature of her style, the author reminds me of Wa- 
terloo. That charming painter was distinguished from 
his contemporary Ruysdael, and his scholar Hobbema, 
by his peculiarity of treating rural scenes, in relation 
to their influence on man. His pictures speak to the 
heart as well as to the eye. He employs very simple 
instruments for the purpose. Perhaps a narrow foot- 
path winds across the fields, and m lost in the gloom 
of thick trees ; but a faint glimmer of a cottage plays 
through the branches. The domestic interior of hum- 
ble afi'ection is opened to our eyes ; the fire of sticks 
blazes upon the hearth; the housewife is busy at "her 
evening care" — 

His children run to lisp then* sire's return, 
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share. 

This burying of life in the cool depth of nature, 
and making peacefulness and action to help and re- 
lieve one another, appears to me a happy secret of 
landscape description. It is never skilfully intro- 



114 JOURNAL OF 



duced without success. Whoever has looked at the 
works of Wouverman must have observed the outline 
of his buildings, cottage-roof, shed, or garden-wall, to 
be always broken by trees or some kind of verdure. 
The effect is most pleasant and refreshing. 

I have suggested a comparison of Our Village 
with the pictures of Waterloo ; and there is another 
master who may afford a striking parallel in a differ- 
ent kind of excellence. I allude to Terburg, the 
most refined and eloquent of all genre painters. His 
distinguishing power is seen in his manner of leaving 
a story to be partly unravelled by the spectator him- 
self Waagen styles him the inventor of conversa- 
tional-painting — tMfe genteel comedy of art. I always 
enjoy this surprise in the people of Our Village. 

A further resemblance between the works of the 
genre painters, and these sketches of country life, is 
suggested by their high finish. The old velvet chair 
of Gerard Dow, worn threadbare by use, is not more 
startling. It is scarcely to be expected that the 
merits of a school should be accompanied by none of 
its defects. I have heard objections to the frequent 
repetition of similar characters, incidents, and land- 
scapes. But what reader of taste would wish them 
to be altered ? The story of the connoisseur rises to 
the memory: " Now," said he, to a visitor in his splen- 
did gallery, " I will show you a real curiosity. There 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 115 

is a Wouverman without a horse in it." The omis- 
sion was rare, but the picture was worthless. For 
my own part, I delight in seeing the favourite faces, 
scenes, or furniture, of a painter or author reproduced 
under various combinations. The sameness is a wit- 
ness of authenticity. The jug and pipe are the auto- 
graph of Teniers. 

I lay down my pen with one remark upon a quality 
of the highest interest and value in Miss Mitford's sto- 
ries — the good humour, happiness, and contentment of 
her men and women. Most of them live on the sunny 
side of the hamlet, and those who dwell in the shadow 
seem to be willing and waiting to cross oyer into the 
light. This joyous temperament is agreeably opposed 
to the dark and stern system of Crabbe. Each de- 
lineation is true, because it is a copy after the life. 
But Crabbe drew nature in her degradation — Mitford, 
in her beauty. Hence the different aspect which the 
village assumes under the pencil of the poet and the 
sketcher. It takes the colour of the mind and feel- 
ing. Perhaps a tinge of exaggeration may be observ- 
able in both ; the one elevating and irradiating what- 
ever she finds of things honest and of good report in 
the annals of the poor ; the other, depressing and 
blackening into grotesque deformity, and with a deep- 
er shade, all that is harsh and repulsive in their say- 
ings, doings, and crimes. We have a like result in art. 



116 JOURNAL OF 



The banditti of Salvator Rosa become heroes; while 
the patriarchs of Rembrandt dwindle into beggars. 
The book and the picture will always hold some 
prejudice in solution ; but each may be a gainer by 
its presence. 

June 29th. — ^Took up Waller for a few minutes 
this afternoon ; how fortunate he has been in critics 
and fame. Denham commended his brave flights ; 
Fenton thought his muse more beautiful than Juno 
in the girdle of Venus ; Clarendon saw in him the 
apparition of a tenth muse ; Prior joins him with 
Davenant in the achievement of reforming our verse ; 
Pope loved his music ; Addison praised his fancy 
and rhymes ; Atterbury lifted him^ as a master of 
language, above Spenser ; Blackstone — he of the 
Commentaries — delighted in " Waller's ease" dis- 
played on the lyre of Pope. Even Johnson welcomed 
him with warmth, unusual in his critical embraces. 
In this clamour of panegyric, Beattie had courage to 
raise up his hand. " Of Waller, it can only be said 
that he is not harsh." Descending into modern criti- 
cism, we find the spell retaining much of its early 
power. " Waller has, perhaps, received more than 
due praise for the refinement of his native language," 
is the conciliatory description of Southey. The "cor- 
rect Waller" is the somewhat colder salutation of 



SUMMEIl TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 117 

Campbell. Hallam has a grave smile in his favour. 
After all, the reputation of Waller is hardly to be 
explained. Six or seven poems omitted, his composi- 
tion is not remarkable for harmony or elegance. To 
say with Atterbury, that the English tongue came 
into his hands like a rough diamond, to be polished 
into beauty, is like telling us that the rude-portrait 
painting of Titian or Velasquez was perfected by 
Kneller. Twenty years separated the last pro- 
duction of Spenser and the first of Waller, and 
Atterbury triumphantly contrasts the modern grace 
and the sombre antiquity. The archaisms of Spenser 
had been already censured by Ben Jonson; and Pope 
complained that — 

Spenser himself affects the obsolete. 

But the old words of the poet, like the foreign accent 
of a sweet voice, gave a charm to the tone, without, 
in any large degree, obscuring the sense. The truth 
is, that every pause, turn, and variety of expression, 
in Waller, are to be found in the magnificent stanza 
of Spenser. He had sounded the depth of our versi- 
fication ; the lyric fiow and organ notes of Milton ; 
the heroic swell of Dryden ; and the tuneful antithe- 
sis of Pope. Open the Faery Queen at any page — 



118 JOURNAL OF 



And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft. 

B. I, c. i., St. 41. 
And fed with words that conld not choose but please. 

Ibid., 54. 
Had spread her purple robe through dewy aire. 

C. ii., St. 1. 
A rosy girlond was the victor's meed. 

Ibid., 37. 
Oh, how can beauty master the most strong, 
And simple truth subdue avenging wrong. 

C. iii., St. 1, 
— Fauns and satyrs far away. 
Within the wood were dancing in a round. 
While old Sylvanus slept in shady arbour sound. 

B. I, c. vi., st. 7. 

Could Waller mend these lines? and they are 
only drops from a fountain. Spenser made Waller, 
although Dryden chose to call him the poetical son of 
Fairfax. I know that Dryden had Waller's author- 
ity for claiming the relationship, for he had heard him 
own that he derived the harmony of his numbers from 
Godfrey of Bulloigne. But if Waller was really 
taught by Fairfax, he only painted from a shadow in 
the water, when the countenance itself was close by his 
side. I am not undervaluing the soft numbers of the 
English Tasso, who was worthy of an age that pro- 
duced the Faery Queen. His translation of Tasso 
has some claim to be called an original poem, for 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 119 

more than half of the images in it are said to be his 
own. The last line of the following stanza is of the 
number— 

And forth she went, a ship for merchandize, 
Full of rich stuff, but none for sale exposed, 

A veil obscur'd the sunshine of her eyes, 
The rose within herself her sweetness closed. 

But let Waller receive his due praise. To the 
old English cadence he imparted a French playful- 
ness. His fancy was pleasing and graceful, and his 
poetic feelings were refined and sincere. His pane- 
gyric on the Protector contains a few lines of exceed- 
ing merit, as in the allusion to the quarrel of Caesar, 
Antony, and Brutus— 

That sun once set, a thousand meaner stars 
Gave a dim light to violence and wars. 

And the description of England, weary and sad, lay- 
ing her head on the bosom of Cromwell, is a grand 
design for a historical picture. 

June 30th. — Spent ten minutes in watching — 
'Mid the deep umbrage of a green hill's side, 



120 JO UKN AL OF 



the birth J growth, and death of a rainbow. Springing 
from the fir-trees behind the church, it over-arched 
the garden where our departed parishioners rest, and 
seemed to fix its pedestal of ruby and emerald on 
the opposite cornfield. The ploughman is just creep- 
ing from under the dripping hedge, and returns to his 
toil through a gate of glory. While I look into the 
sky, the leaves sparkle with a dazzling splendour, 

— downy gold 
And colours dipped in heaven ; 

and now the lighted column dissolves in a rain of 
purple and amethyst. The field, under the gilded 
rim of the distant horizon, looks as if it were sown 
with precious stones, broken up into dust; for the 
dying rainbow has melted away on the ground. I 
never saw anything so wonderful — of nature, and yet 
above her. Turner has not imagined on canvas a 
combination of tints more extravagant. All is fresh- 
ness, transparency, and bloom. What a pleasant tu- 
mult in the green hedge-rows and glittering grass ! 
A thought comes into my mind, as I shake the rain 
out of this lily, how calm and unpretending is the 
growth of everything beautiful in God's visible world ! 
no noise ! no pretension ! You never hear a rose 
opening, or a tulip shooting forth its gorgeous streaks. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 121 

The soul increases in beauty as its life resembles the 
flower's ! Addison said that our time is most profit- 
ably employed in doings that make no figure in the 
world. He spoke from experience. Often must he 
have contrasted his solitary walks in the cloisters of 
Magdalen with the sumptuous turmoil of Holland 
House ; and the cheerful greeting of a college friend 
on the banks of the Cherwell, with the silken rustle 
of the imperious Warwick ! And there is yet another 
reflection to be drawn from this vanished rainbow: 
it is the remembrance of that Bow of Faith which 
paints th^ rainy clouds of our life with beauty : 

— the soft gleam of Christian worth 
Which on some holy house we mark ; 
Dear to the pastor's aching heart, 
To think, where'er he looks, such gleam may have a pari 

July 1st. — It is impossible to read a page of lit- 
erary history without being amazed by the vast capa- 
city of recollection in famous men. The great Latin 
critic measured genius by memory. Remarkable 
stories are told of one of his own countrymen. Se- 
neca, in his youthj repeated two thousand words in 
the order in which they had been uttered. In mod- 
ern times, Mozart, with the help of a sketch in the 
crown of his hat, carried away the Miserere of Al- 
legri, which he heard in the Sistine chapel 
6 



122 JOURNAL OF 



English theology furnishes several splendid exam- 
ples of the faculty. Jewell was especially distin- 
guished. On one occasion, the martyr Hooper wrote 
forty Irish words, which Jewell, after three or four 
perusals, repeated according to their position, back- 
wards and forwards. He performed a feat not less 
difficult with a passage from Erasmus, which Lord 
Bacon read to him. Saunderson knew by heart the 
Odes of Horace, the Offices of Cicero, and a consid- 
erable portion of Juvenal and Persius. Bates, the 
eloquent friend of Howe, rivalled the Greek philoso- 
pher mentioned by Pliny; and having delivered a 
public and unwritten address, went over it again with 
perfect ease and accuracy. Warburton was not infe- 
rior to his illustrious predecessors. His common- 
place-book was an old almanac, three inches square, 
in which he inserted occasional references, or hints of 
thoughts and sentences, to be woven into his composi- 
tions. But all the erudition of the Divine Legation 
was intrusted to memory. Pope's description of Bo- 
lingbroke is true of Warburton : " He sits like an 
intelligence, and recollects all the question within 
himself." Lord Clarendon declared that Hales, of 
Eton, carried about in his memory more learning 
than any scholar in the world. 

Turning into a wider path, we find men of differ- 
ent ages and dispositions employing this endowment in 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 123 

poetical acquisitions. Glassendi had on his lips the 
poetry of Lucretius ; M. Angelo, the greater part of 
Dante and Petrarch ; and Galileo, of Ariosto, Pe- 
trarch, and Berni. Fontenelle mentions the ability 
of Leibnitz, even in old age, to repeat nearly all the 
poetry of Virgil, word for word ; an amusing contrast 
to Malebranche, who never read ten verses without 
disgust. To these instances may be added that of 
Pope, who had not only a general, but local memory 
of much strength. He recollected the particular page 
of the book in which the fact or story was related. 
" If," wrote Atterbury, '* you have not read the verses 
lately, I am sure you remember them, because you 
forget nothing." 

I will put down one case of memory ingeniously 
used, and another of the talent largely possessed, but 
without flexibility or advantage. The former refers 
to the renowned Hyder Ali. Unable to read or write, 
he had an ingenious contrivance for insuring the ve- 
racity of his correspondence. His secretary, having 
prepared the letter, read it aloud ; it was then given 
to another person, who repeated it ; and any discrep- 
ancy between the two was punished by the execution 
of the scribe. The next example refers to Walter 
Scott's friend. Dr. Leyden. A single perusal of an 
Act of Parliament, or any long document, prepared 
him to recite it ; but the collective was unaccompanied 



124 JOURNAL OF 



by tlie analytical power. He remembered the whole, 
not the parts. To recover a passage or sentence, he 
was obliged to return to the beginning. Wallis, the 
mathematician, without light, pen, ink, or paper, ex- 
tracted the square root of twenty-seven places of fig- 
ures, and kept the unwritten result in his memory 
during a month. 

In literature and art, memory is a synonyme for 
invention ; it is the life-blood of imagination, which 
faints and dies when the veins are empty. The saying 
of Reynolds has the force of an axiom: "Genius may 
anticipate the season of maturity ; but in the educa- 
tion of a people, as in that of an individual, memory 
must be exercised before the powers of reason and 
fancy can be expanded ; nor may the artist hope to 
equal or surpass, till he has learned to imitate the 
works of his predecessors." Mozart studied the pro- 
ductions of every renowned composer with intense in- 
dustry. 

The memory must be educated in order to be ser- 
viceable. A straggling field of learning unenclosed 
affords poor and insufiicient pasturage. Boundary- 
lines are indispensable. As Shenstone said, our 
thoughts and observations must be sorted. This art 
of cultivation may be condensed into four rules — 1. 
The habit of fixing the mind, like the eye, upon one 
object. 2. The application of the powers of reflec- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 125 

tion. 3. The watchfulness of understanding which is 
known, in a good sense, as curiosity. 4. Method. 
After every effort and precaution, memory is that del- 
icate hand of the intellect which seems to be most 
susceptible of violence or disease ; its fine nerves 
quickly lose their energy, and cease to obey the im- 
pulse of the mind. The muscular sense of the mem- 
ber decays and vanishes. 

Locke has illustrated the varying strength and 
duration of this faculty (Human Understanding, ch. 
X. sec. 5) by a metaphor, unsurpassed in our language 
for beauty of conception, aptness of application, and 
completeness of structure. " Our minds represent to 
us those tombs to which we are approaching ; where 
though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscrip- 
tions are effaced by time, and the imagery moulders 
away. How much the constitution of our bodies, and 
the make of our animal spirits, are concerned in this, 
and whether the temper of the brain makes this dif- 
ference, that in some it retains the characters drawn 
on it like marble, in others like freestone, and in others 
little better than sand, I shall not here inquire. 
Though it may seem probable, that the constitution of 
the body does sometimes influence the memory ; since 
we sometimes find a disease quite strip the memory of 
all its ideas ; and the flames of a fever, in a few days, 
calcine all those images into dust and confusion, 



126 JOURNAL OF 



which seemed to be as lasting as if engraved on mar- 
ble." 

The influence of sorrow or sickness npon the mem- 
ory might be considered with great interest. Dr. 
Rush, an American physician, records a touching cir- 
cumstance. He was called to visit a woman whom he 
had known in childhood. He found her rapidly sink- 
ing in typhus fever. Three words — " the Eagle's 
Nest" — at once soothed and brightened her mind. 
The tree had grown on her father's farm, and the 
name brought back the freshness and joy of her early 
days. From that hour she began to amend, and the 
fever left her : 

One clear idea wakened in the breast 
By memory's magic lets in all the rest. 

Widely may the story be expanded and applied ! 
If the desolate alleys and attics of London could 
speak, they would tell how the old familiar haunts of 
youth and manhood return upon the heart ; how fields, 
rivers, or villages, shine before the eyes ; how the 
woodbine, flaunting up the cottage window, hangs its 
white clusters down the damp walls of the cellar. 
Chaucer rejoiced in the daisy springing through the 
chinks of his dungeon ; Shakspere watched the moon- 
light chequer the boards of the Glebe theatre, just as 
it slept on the banks of the green lanes round Strat- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 127 

ford ; Goldsmith heard the nightingale in the pauses 
of Green Arbour Court ; Bloomfield saw the orchard 
bloom shaken by thrushes, startled in their song, over 
his dark garret ; when the thump of the hammer on 
some impracticable sole recalled the flail in a Suffolk 
barn, descending " full on the destined ear ;" Words- 
worth beheld the dim Abbey of Tintern, and green 
farms along the pastoral Wye, in the tumult and fever 
of London life. Beautiful memory of the eyes ! Yes, 
if the squalid courts of great cities might speak — 
dingy walls and broken casements publish their con- 
fessions — what histories they would tell of suffering, 
bleeding, illuminated genius : — Of stricken hearts, 
fainting with the arrow, and retiring to lonely corners 
to die ; yet, by the enchantment of imagination, trans- 
forming hovels into palaces, miserable alleys into gar- 
dens of beauty, and glades " mild opening to the gold- 
en day." 

July 2nd. — Read the fourteenth sermon of Bishop 
Patrick, in the volume published after his death. I 
was aware that Richardson's Pamela had been recom- 
mended from the pulpit, but did not know until this 
morning that the Essays of Cowley were publicly 
praised by the learned Bishop of Ely. He is speak- 
ing of princes whose power failed to afford them em- 
ployment or happiness. " One of them (as a rare 



128 JOURNAL OF 



person of our nation hath expressed it better than I 
can do) who styled himself lord and god of all the 
earth, could not tell how to pass his day pleasantly 
without spending two or three hours in catching flies, 
and killing them with a bodkin." The "rare person" 
is Cowley, to whom Patrick refers in the margin. 
The passage is in the Essay on Greatness, where we 
meet with an amusing allusion to contemporary man- 
ners :- — " Is anything more common than to see our 
ladies of quality wear such high shoes as they cannot 
walk in without one to lead them, and a gown as long 
again as their body, so that they cannot stir to the 
next room without a page or two to hold it up ?" 

The honour bestowed on Cowley and Richardson 
was afterwards shared by Gray. Home, the author 
of Douglas, was with a relation in the little church 
called Haddo's Hold, when the minister introduced a 
panegyric of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard, 
then recently published. But this tribute of applause 
was surpassed by another from a very difi*erent per- 
son. The anecdote was first related by Playfair, in 
the Life of Professor Eobinson, who served as an 
engineer under General Wolfe. On the evening be- 
fore the battle of Quebec, he accompanied the com- 
mander in his visits to some of the posts: — "As they 
rowed along, the General, with much feeling, repeated 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 129 

nearly the whole of Gray's Elegy to an officer who 
sat with him in the stern of the boat^ adding, as he 
concluded- — 'that he would prefer being the author of 
that poem to the glory of beating the French to-mor- 
row." Wolfe w^as a young man, and on the following 
day was to realize the truth of one of the grandest 
lines in the poem he recited — 

The paths of glory lead but to the grave. 

If G-ray had known of this river scene, he would have 
found something more serious to write to Dr. Whar- 
ton (Nov. 28, 1759) than the tale of a declamatory 
person "proposing a monument to Wolfe. In the 
course of it he wiped his eyes with one handkerchief, 
and Beckford (who seconded him) cried too, and 
wiped with two handkerchiefs at once, which was very 
moving." 

July 3rd.— Have the readers of Paley observed 
the correspondence between the beginning of his fa- 
mous chapter on Property, and a passage in Ben Jon- 
son's comedy of the Fox, in that inimitable scene 
where Volpone, with the help of his servant Mosca, 
deceives the hypocritical inquirers after his health : — 

6^ 



130 



JOURNAL OF 



Ben Jonson. 

— And besides, sir, 
We are not like the thresher 

that does stand 
With a huge flail, watching a 

heap of corn, 
And, hungry, dares not taste 

the smallest grain. 
But feeds on mallows and such 

bitter herbs. 



Paley. 

"If you should see a flock 
of pigeons in a field of corn, 
and if, (instead of each pick- 
ing where and what it liked, 
taking just as much as it 
wanted, and no more,) you 
should see ninety and nine of 
them gathering all they got 
into a heap, reserving nothing 
for themselves but the chaff 
and refuse." 



Doubtless this resemblance was accidental ; but Paley 
was an admirable thief. Property, in his hands, bears 
compound interest. He plundered his brethren like 
a genius ; a peculiarity which, according to Warbur- 
ton, made Virgil an original author, and Blackmore 
an imitator: — "for they certainly were borrowers 
alike." 



July 5th. — We have in Berks a few picturesque 
old houses, scattered up and down, and they always 
contribute a most pleasing interest to a country walk. 
The villages round Cambridge abound in them. In 
Kent, the half-timbered houses are distinguished by 
the name of wood-noggin^ because the pieces of tim- 
ber used in the framing are called wood-nogs^ nogging 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTPcY. 131 

'^ being a species of brickwork carried up in panels 
between quarters." Sometimes flowers and patterns 
are worked in the plaster. At Newnhamj near Fe- 
versham, is a house of this description, with a red 
ground and white flowers. The half-timber houses of 
Cheshire, familiarly known as " post and pan houses," 
are often very picture-like ; and we have only to look 
at the works of the old masters to recognize the value 
of these architectural embellishments. Ostade adapt- 
ed and combined them with wonderful skill. His 
buildings of unequal height are thrown into difl'erent 
degrees of perspective ; the sides, in the words of 
Price, being "varied by projecting windows and iron ; 
by sheds supported by brackets, with flower-pots in 
them ; by the light, airy, and detached appearance of 
cages hung out from the wall ; by porches and trel- 
lises of various construction, often covered with vine 
or ivy." We observe the same kind of effect in the 
" chateau" of Rubens. The turrets gleam among the 
trees ; thin smoke just vanishes into cloud ; the sun 
glows on the windows. Add an antique balustrade, a 
foot-bridge with anglers leaning over, a few peasants, 
a fowler, windmill sails faintly seen in the distance — 
slight circumstances — and what a composition they 
make ! ' Modern improvements are rapidly dismant- 
ling our old cities. The German traveller. Kohl, 
mentions Salisbury as the only town in England 



132 JOURNAL OF 



where he saw a large number of houses with thatched 
roofs, and sprinkled with moss. 

July 7th. — Looked over a little volume showing 
the obligations of literature to the mothers of Eng- 
land. Our greatest monarch opens the record. Asser 
relates, that Alfred was tempted into learning to read 
by the splendour of a MS. which his mother promised 
him. There is a well-known story of Chatterton's 
faculties being awakened by the illumined capitals of 
some French music. But the early passion for books 
was never developed more strikingly than in Tasso 
and Shenstone, though with such unequal results. 
Tasso, in his -eighth year, began his studies with the 
rising sun, and was so impatient for the hour, that his 
mother often sent him to school with a lantern. Shen- 
stone' s mother quieted him for the night by wrapping 
up a piece of wood in the shape of a book and putting 
it under his pillow. Burns caught the music of old 
ballads from his mother singing at her wheel. 

A living poet has drawn the character of such a 
loving and Christian parent with eloquence and feel- 
ing not unbecoming the theme : — 

Her by her smile how soon the stranger knows, 
How soon by his the glad discovery shows, 
As to her lips she lifts the lovely boy, 
"What answering looks of sympathy and joy ! 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY, 133 

He walks, he speaks! In many a broken word 
His wants, his wishes, and his griefs are heard. 
And ever, ever to her lap he flies, 
"When rosy sleep comes on with sweet surprise ; 
Locked in her arms, his arms across her flung, 
(That name most dear, for ever on his tongue.) 
But soon a nobler task demands her care, 
Apart she joins his little hands in prayer, 
Telling of Him who sees in secret there. 
And now the volume on her knee has caught 
His wandering eye— now many a written thought, 
JiTever to die, with many a lisping sweet. 
His moving, murmuring lips, endeavour to repeat. 

No incident in tlie sad story of Bloomfield is so 
pleasing as his return to the home of his childhood, 
after a wearisome absence of twelve years. He took 
the Farmer's Boy in his hand, a present for his 
mother. He had not forgotten the eventful morning 
when she travelled with him to London, and left him 
with his elder brother in one of the dismallest courts 
of that great city, "with a charge, as he valued a 
mother's blessing, to watch over him, to set good ex- 
amples for him, and never to forget that he had lost 
his father." 

Bishop Jewell had his mother's name engraved on 
a signet-ring, and Lord Bacon poured his heart into 
one short sentence in his will : — " For my burial, I 
desire it may be in St. Michael's Church, near St. 



134 JOURNAL OF 



Alban's ; there was my mother buried." At Dulwich, 
in a dark gown trimmed with fur, holding a book, we 
see the mother of Rubens, who, losing his father in 
childhood, was reared by her watchful tenderness. 
Pope wrote no lines more affecting than the four in- 
scribed on the column to his mother in the garden at 
Twickenham. By Cowper's verses on his mother's 
picture we might place the letter of Gray : ^' It is long 
since I heard you were gone in haste to Yorkshire, on 
account of your mother's illness ; and the same letter 
informed me that she was recovered, otherwise I had 
then wrote to you to beg you would take care of her, 
and to inform you that I had discovered a thing very 
little known, which is, that in one's whole life one can 
never have any more than a single mother." After 
his death, her clothes were found in the trunk as she 
had left them, her son never having had courage to 
open it and distribute the legacies. Two celebrated 
persons not unknown to Gray, Warburton and Hurd, 
have touched the same chord of feeling ; and in mod- 
ern times its music has been heard in the homes of 
genius. In one of Wordsworth's sonnets — Catechis- 
ing — is a pleasing allusion to the days of boyhood : — 

How fluttered then thy anxious heart for me, 
Beloved mother ! Thou whose happy hand 
Had bound the flowers I wore with faithful tie. 
Sweet flowers ! at whose inaudible command 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 135 

Her countenance, phantom-like, doth reappear! 
0, lost too early for this frequent tear, 
And ill requited by this heart-felt sigh. 

And one more famous than Wordsworth has given the 
same testimony: it is of Walter Scott that the writer 
speaks : " On lifting up his desk, we found arranged in 
careful order a series of little objects, so placed that 
his eye might rest on them every morning before he 
began his tasks. There were the old-fashioned boxes 
that had garnished his mother's toilette, when he, a 
sickly child, slept in her dressing-room; the silver 
taper-stand which the young advocate had bought for 
her with his first five-guinea fee : a row of small 
packets inscribed with her hand, and containing the 
hair of those of her ofi'spring who had died before her, 
and more things of the like sort recalling ' The old 
familiar faces.' " I will write here, by way of scholi- 
ast, the beautiful verses of that poet whom, of contem- 
poraries, Scott most admired — Crabbe : 

Arrived at home, how then he gazed around 
On every place where she no more was found ; 
The seat at table she was wont to fill. 
The fire-side chair still set, but vacant still ; 
The Sunday pew she filled with all her race; 
Each place of hers was now a sacred place ! 

Nor has literature any monopoly in this affection 



136 JOURNAL OF 



of the heart. The desk and the battle-field tell the 
same story. The circumstance in Sir John Moore's 
history, that falls upon the ear with the strongest pa- 
thos, is the message he faltered out to his mother, 
while falling from his horse at Corunna. 

July 9th. — Read Mr. Keble's Praelections, ix., x. 
There may be truth, as there certainly is beauty, in 
his suggestion, that in all the varieties of literary 
composition, order and harmony can be traced. First 
come the glow, the animation, the pride of the na- 

^-n e-w cIa : 'l \ 

tional heart, in the magnificent legions of ancestral 
renown ; this is the poetry of the Epos. Then wind 
along the diversified scenes of life, in its dignity of 
dominion, splendour of exploit, and solemnity of grief; 
this is the many-coloured episode of the drama. 
Lastly appear the sweeter pictures of retirement and 
peace. The traveller, tired of wandering, sighs for 
home ; the glitter of the pageant melts, and the soul 
reveals its indwelling principle of immortality by rest- 
less desires after pleasures simpler and more enduring. 
The ocean of mystery rolls onward beneath the down- 
stooping and burning eye. Then Nature, neglected 
and despised, uncovers her bosom to her child hanging 
over the precipice, and wins him back to her arms with 
the endearing tenderness of the mother. And this is 
the poetry of rural description. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 137 

Those reflections of heaveiij which we call the 
charms of nature, may be intended by the merciful 
Architect to breathe a sacred tranquillity and resigna- 
tion over His weary people. And if it be objected 
that holy men of old, whose lives were kindled with 
fire from the altar, did not so regard or employ the 
scenes around them, I think that Mr. Keble has sup- 
plied an explanation. They possessed what the Greek 
and Latin poets wanted- — a sure and certain hope of 
lasting blessedness and repose. They needed not the 
sheltering embrace of woods, and the still valleys of 
pastoral solitude, to cheer and soothe their disquieted 
souls. They did not look to the autumn sun, to gild 
their dark path and journey, because a purer light was 
always present, shedding over their thoughts and foot- 
steps a glory that neither sickness, nor poverty, nor 
danger, nor death itself, could extinguish. The ob- 
jects of love scattered over the earth were observed. 
They used them to magnify the splendour and attri- 
butes of the Creator ; not to mitigate the sufferings 
or disperse the griefs of the creature. They longed 
for the wings of the dove, not that they might flee 
away to the mountain-top, or the gloom of the cedar ; 
but yearned for the fairer country, whither they knew 
themselves to be travelling. So they made this world, 
with all its delio;hts, a ladder to the next, and life an 
Olivet, where the cloud of Paradise might descend. 



138 JOURNAL OF 



The early Christians had no descriptive poetry ; they 
found other organs of utterance — the Hebrew prophe- 
cieSj prayerSj songs of devotion, the Sacraments ; these 
were the veins carrying along the fervid blood of 
the spiritual frame. Christian truth was Christian 
poetry. 

The origin of rural song has occasioned less con- 
troversy than the rank to be assigned to it. The 
merry-making or quarrelling of boors in Teniers, and 
the familiar life of Brouwer or Ostade, are excellent 
in their kind; but Reynolds estimates its value by 
the rare or frequent introduction of the passions, as 
they appear in general and more enlarged nature. 
This rule he applies to the battle-pieces of Bourgog- 
none, the gallantries of Watteau, the landscapes of 
Claude, and the sea-views of Vandervelde. In all of 
which he discovers the same claim, in different de- 
grees, to the title and dignity of a painter, as a sati- 
rist, sonneteer, epigrammatist, or describer, might as- 
sert to that of a poet. But this criticism, however 
just of colour and design, bears very weakly on com- 
positions of the pen. 

July 1 1th. — There is a saying of Pascal that trees 
not fruitful in their native earth, often yield abundant- 
ly if transplanted. I have just fallen upon an illustra- 
tion in Chalmers' discourse on the " Expulsive power 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 139 

of a new affection." His argument is after this man- 
ner. Practical morality has two methods of dis- 
placing the love of the world in the heart ; one by 
showing the vanity of it, and making its rejection flow 
out of a sense of unworthiness in the thing desired ; 
another, by exhibiting a fresh object, and substituting 
a new appetite and affection for the old. He proves 
that the constitution of our nature does not, instinct- 
ively or voluntarily, cast out a passion for its native 
baseness. One must be expelled by another ; the evil 
by the good. The heart cannot be empty. The mo- 
ral, like the physical system, abhors a vacuum. The 
youth of folly has its old age of cards. The tumult 
of the ball subsides into a shuffle. There must ever 
be the ascendancy of a new passion. The strong man 
is not to be destroyed, but dispossessed. You may fill 
the throne, not overthrow it. Whatever be the suc- 
cession of mental revolutions, a despotism will prevail. 
Subdue the old desire by the expulsive power of the 
new. Such is the course of Chalmers' exposition. Is 
it his own ? Let us endeavour to follow the stream to 
the spring. If we turn to the second Epistle of Pope, 
we find him acknowledging the insufficiency of reason, 
which only removes the " weaker passions for the 
strong," at the same time that he proclaims its power 
to shape, modify, and dispose : — 



140 JOURNAL OF 

See anger, zeal and fortitude supply ; 
See avarice, prudence— sloth, philosophy. 



We hear in this brief aphorism a faint sound of 
Chalmers ; there is something here of the expulsive 
power of a new affection. But the stream does not 
lose itself at Twickenham; it winds far away among 
the hills, into those sequestered haunts of philosophy 
whither Pope was probably led by Bolingbroke. In 
the high and sunny region of Bacon's imagination the 
fountain rises : " It is of especial use in morality, to 
set affection against affection, and endeavour to master 
one passion by another, as we hunt beast with beast." 
Here we reach the true source of the river, which 
Chalmers, enlarging with many tributary rivulets, has 
rolled through a rich and fertile tract of argument, 
metaphor, and exhortation. 

The secret of intellectual excellence lies in this 
painful travelling back to the old fountains. Locke 
says, that the water running from the spring is the 
property of every man ; but that the pitcher belongs 
to him who fills it. He who goes to the original au- 
thor — the well-head — draws from a public reservoir. 
The student should despise the pitcher as much as he 
can. In theology, above all branches of literature, 
new streams, that sparkle to the eye and refresh the 
thirst, commonly flow from the old springs ; one short 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 



141 



caution may be given and recollected ; keep out of 
your own century. Why read tlie modern treatise or 
sermon, when you have Hooker and Donne ? This is 
deposing the monarch to set up the chamberlain. 

Having represented Chalmers as the copier, I will 
now exhibit him as the copied. His lectures on the 
Christian Revelation, viewed in connexion with mod- 
ern astronomy, contain many splendid, and some sub- 
lime images and illustrations. One of the most strik- 
ing has been happily imitated by Mrs. Hemans, in an 
early poem called " The Sceptic." 



Chalmers. 

The leaf quivers on the 
branch that supports it, and 
lies at the mercy of the shght- 
est accident. A breath of 
wind tears it from its stem. 
In a moment of time the hfe, 
which we know by the mi- 
croscope it teems with, is ex- 
tinguished, and an occurrence 
so insignificant in the eye of 
man, and in the scale of his 
observation, carries in it to 
the myriads that people this 
little leaf, an event as terrible 
and as decisive as the destruc- 
tion of the world. 



Hemans. 

As the light leaf, whose fall to 

ruin bears 
Some trembling insect's little 

world of cares, 
Descends in silence, while 

around waves on 
The mighty forest, reckless 

what is gone : 
Such is man's doom, and ere 

the autumn's flown— 
Start not, thou trifler! such 

may be thine own. 



142 JOURNAL OF 



July 12th. — Our wood is very gay this evening 
with a rustic tea-party : 

And far and wide oyer the vicar's pale, 
Black hoods and scarlet crossing hill and dale, 
All, all abroad, and music in the gale. 

In a former page of this journal I proposed a his- 
tory of gardens ; and the writer, when he is found, 
may add a supplementary chapter on those out-of-door 
entertainments, which are so pleasantly associated 
with trees, flowers, turf, beauty, and singing. Pliny 
and Cowper might be the representatives of the an- 
cient and modern fashions. The Italian author re- 
joiced in every element of the elegant and rural. His 
villa was sheltered by the Apennines ; a green plain 
stretched before it, and fruitful vineyards waved be- 
low. Taste embellished what nature supplied. In 
the grounds was a basin of exquisitely polished mar- 
ble, always full of crystal water, but never overflow- 
ing. " When I sup here," Pliny wrote to a friend, 
'^ this basin serves me for a table, the larger sort of 
dishes being placed round the margin, while the 
smaller swim about in the form of little vessels and 
water-fowl." Some vestige of this liq^uid furniture 
may still be recognised. When Captain Basil Hall 
visited the baths of Leuk, he found the bathers im- 
mersed nearly up to the throat, with tables floating 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 143 



before them, on which the ladies put their work, the 
gentlemen their hooks or newspapers, and the children 
their toys. 

Louis XV. invented a sinking sideboard at Choisi. 
It rose, presented its treasure, and disappeared, — 

Lo ! here attendant on the shadowy hour, 
The closet supper served by hands unseen. 

But French and Latin luxury dwindles away be- 
fore the magnificent festivals of that Castle, which 
Thomson built in his golden verse ; where no bell 
rings ; no knocker resounds ; but bright doors open of 
their own accord into halls heaped with the softness 
and splendour of Turkey and Persia :-— 

Soft quilts on quilts, on carpets, carpets spread, 
And couches stretched around in seemly band. 
And endless pillows rise to prop the head. 
So that each spacious room was one full swelling bed. 

And everywhere huge covered tables stood. 
With wines high-flavour'd, and rich viands crown'd; 
Whatever sprightly juice or tasteful food 
On the green bosom of this earth are found, 
And all old ocean genders in his round ; 
Some hand unseen these silently display'd, 
Even undemanded by a sign or sound ; 
You need but wish, and, instantly obey'd, 
Fair rang'd the dishes rose, and thick the glasses played. 



144 JOURNAL OF 



So much for the picturesque of Pic-Nics. Let us 
turn to the simpler entertainment of country life : — 

A holy-day — the frugal banquet spread 

On the fresh herbage near the fountain head. 

With quips and cranks — what time the wood-lark there 

Scatters her loose notes on the sultry air. 

The Roman villa fades into the blue Apennines, and 
green hedges and chestnut trees of an English village 
grow up. Instead of Pliny we have Cowper : — " Yes- 
terday se'nnight we all dined together in the Spinnie, 
a most delightful retirement belonging to Mr. Throck- 
morton, of Weston. Lady Austin's lackey, and a lad 
that waits on me in the garden, drove a wheelbarrow 
full of eatables and drinkables to the scene of our 
fete champetre. A board laid over the top of the 
wheelbarrow served us for a table. Our dining-room 
was a root-house, lined with moss and ivy. At six 
o'clock the servants, who had dined under the great 
elm, upon the ground, at a little distance, boiled the 
kettle, and the said wheelbarrow served us for a table." 

July 13th. — In the cumbersome edition of the 
works of Parr, among many dull letters of dull people 
is one of interest from Bennet, Bishop of Cloyne, de- 
scribing the episcopal residence, where Berkeley, the 
accomplished friend of Pope, formerly dwelt. A few 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 145 

traces of him are preserved. The garden abounded 
in strawberries, of which Berkeley was very fond. But 
its most singular feature was a winding walk, nearly a 
quarter of a mile in length, enclosed for a considera- 
ble part of the distance by a myrtle hedge, six feet 
high, planted by Berkeley himself, each plant having 
a large ball of tar at the root. 

The tar-epidemic spread far and wide. Gray tells 
Dr. Wharton : — " Mr. Trollope and I are in a course 
of tar-water ; he for his present, I for my future dis- 
tempers. If you think it will kill me, send away a 
man and horse directly, for I drink like a fish." But 
the myrtle hedge of Cloyne was, doubtless, the earliest 
instance of this medical treatment applied to trees. 

Of Berkeley little is remembered. Bennet told 
Parr that " he made no improvement to the house ; 
yet the part of it he inhabited w^anted it much ; for it 
is now only good enough for the upper servants. My 
study is the room where he kept his apparatus for tar- 
water." Indeed, the gifted enthusiast was too busy 
and happy to be anxious about refinements of accom- 
modation. With a wife who painted gracefully, sang 
like a nightingale, and appreciated her husband ; with 
children who resembled their parents in all the ac- 
complishments of taste and the graces of piety ; and 
with a temper himself of singular sweetness and amia- 
bility, — what could he sigh for ? The dismallest room 
1 



146 JOURNAL OF 



in Cloyne must have been full of sunlight. Never 
was seen a domestic interior of tenderer beauty and 
affection ; and in the bishop's letters we catch an oc- 
casional glimpse of it — " The more we have of good 
instruments the better ; for all my children, not ex- 
cepting my little daughter, learn to play, and are pre- 
paring to fill my house with harmony against all 
events, that if we have worse times we may have bet- 
ter spirits." Berkeley was the Christian gentleman 
of his age — the Philip Sidney of theology. The 
same fine poetical colour enriched the complexion of 
both ; and the apostle of the Bermudas, like the hero 
of Zutphen, would have ploughed up life and re-sown 
it for Arcadia. 

July 1 4th. — Every one has heard of Gray's wish 
to lie undisturbed on a sofa, and read new romances 
of Marivaux and Crebillon. I was surprised to 
find an Archbishop of York expressing a similar par- 
tiality. Dr. Herring writes to W. Duncombe, No- 
vember 3, 1738 : " I cannot help mentioning a French 
book to you, which I brought in the coach with me — 
Le Paysan Parvenu. It is a book of gallantry, but 
very modest ; the things which entertained me were 
the justice of some of the characters in it, and the 
great penetration into human nature." Mr. Green, of 
Ipswich, speaks of the same novel with more caution 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 147 

and judgment. He admires the scene painting, but 
censures the moral that animates it. Herring, and 
Stone, Primate of Ireland, were the only persons of 
rank or consideration who praised Hume's History of 
England on its first appearance, as the writer tells us 
with pardonable complacency. 

But Marivaux has won golden opinions in later 
times. When a living scholar entered the library of 
Mr. Wyndham, soon after the death of that accom- 
plished person, he saw upon his table the Marianne of 
Marivaux. There is another story-teller in Latin, 
and not much better known, who delighted the most 
unhappy of our poets. Cowper found his Marivaux 
in Barclay, whose romance of Argenis he thought the 
best that ever was written ; in the highest degree in- 
teresting, rich in incident, full of surprises, with a 
narrative free from intricacy, and a style not unwor- 
thy of Tacitus. Barclay was the son of a Scottish 
lawyer ; he went to Rome in the beginning of the 17th 
century, and was buried near Tasso — and, I believe, 
under the same oak. 

July 1 5th. — Most people know the soothing influ- 
ence of a walk — 

Beneath th' umbrageous multitude of leaves, 
Where — 



148 JOURNAL OF 



The stealing shower is scarce to patter heard. 

It was the only rural sensation which Johnson ac- 
knowledged. But there is another woodland pleasure 
he would have been insensible to ; that of stooping in 
calm reverie over a running brook, and watching the 
reflections of trees in the water. I have spent the 
sunny fragments of a sweet afternoon in this visionary 
enjoyment, not without endeavouring to moralize what 
I saw. These leaves of the stream seemed to be im- 
ages of slight circumstances in life — little things that 
influence our hopes, successes, consolations, and pains. 

We are not only pleased, but turned by a feather. 
The history of a man is a calendar of straws. If the 
nose of Cleopatra had been shorter, said Pascal in his 
brilliant way, Antony might have kept the world. 
The Mohammedans have a tradition, that when their 
Prophet concealed himself in Mount Shur, his pursu- 
ers were baffled by a spider's web over the mouth of 
the cave. 

The shadows of leaves in water, then, are to me 
so many lessons of life. I call to mind Demosthenes, 
rushing from the Athenian assembly, burning with 
shame, and in the moment of degradation encountered 
by Satyrus. It was the apparition of his good spirit, 
and changed his fortune. The hisses of his country- 
men melted into distance. He learns the art of Elo- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 149 

cution ; and, when he next ascended the bema.^ his lip 
was roughened by no grit of the pebble. Again: 
Socrates, meeting Xenophon in a narrow gateway, 
stopped him, by extending his stick across the path, 
and inquiring, " How a man might attain to virtue 
and honour ?" Xenophon could not answer ; and the 
philosopher, bidding him follow, became thenceforward 
his master in Ethics. These incidents were shadows 
of leaves on the stream ; but they conducted Demos- 
thenes into the temple of eloquence, and placed Xen- 
ophon by the side of Livy. 

We have pleasing examples nearer home. Evelyn, 
sauntering along a meadow near Says Court, loitered 
to look in at the window of a lonely thatched house, 
where a young man was carving a cartoon of Tintoret. 
He requested permission to enter, and soon recom- 
mended the artist to Charles II. From that day, the 
name of Gibbins belonged to his country. Gibbon, 
among the ruins of Roman grandeur, conceives his 
prose epic ; Thorwaldsen sees a boy sitting on the 
steps of a house, and goes home to model Mercury. 
Opie bends over the shoulder of a companion drawing 
a butterfly, and rises up a painter ; Giotto sketches a 
sheep on a stone, which attracts the notice of Cimabue, 
passing by that way ; and the rude shepherd-boy is 
immortalized by Dante. Milton retires to Chalfont ; 
and that refuge from the plague gives to us Paradise 



150 JOURNAL OF 



Regained. Lady Austin points to a Sofa ; and Cow- 
per creates the Task. A dispute about a music-desk 
awakens the humour of the Lutrin ; and an apothe- 
cary's quarrel produces the Dispensary. The acci- 
dental playing of a Welsh harper at Cambridge, 
inspired Gray with the conclusion of The ' Bard,' 
which had been lying — a noble fragment — for a long 
time in his desk. 

Slight circumstances are the texts of science. 
Pascal heard a common dinner-plate ring, and wrote a 
tract upon sound. While Galileo studied medicine in 
the University of Pisa, the regular oscillation of a 
lamp suspended from the roof of the cathedral at- 
tracted his observation, and led him to consider the 
vibrations of pendulums. Kepler determined to fill 
his cellars from the Austrian vineyards ; but, dispu- 
ting the accuracy of the seller's measurement, he 
worked out one of the " earliest specimens of what is 
now called the modern analysis." Cuvier dissects a 
cuttle-fish ; and the mystery of the whole animal 
kingdom unfolds itself before him. A sheet of paper 
sent from the press, with the letters accidentally 
raised, suggests the embossed alphabet for the blind ; 
and a physician, lying awake and listening to the 
beating of his heart, contributes the most learned 
book upon the diseases of that organ. 

Thus, in life and science, the strange intricacies 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 151 

and unions of things small and splendid are clearly 
discerned. Causes and effects wind into each other. 
" By this most astonishing connexion — these recipro- 
cal correspondences and mutual relations — everything 
which we see in the course of nature is actually 
brought about ; and things, seemingly the most insig- 
nificant imaginable J are perpetually observed to be 
necessary conditions to other things of the greatest 
importance." History is a commentary on the wisdom 
of Butler. A proclamation furls the sails of a ship ; 
and Cromwellj instead of plying his axe in a forest- 
clearing of America, blasphemes God, and beheads 
his sovereign at home. Bruce raises his eyes to the 
ceiling, where a spider was struggling to fix a line for 
his web ; and instead of a crusader, we have the hero 
of Bannockburn. 

No fountain of beauty is unshadowed by leaves. 
Slight circumstances in books, pictures, or statues, 
often make the strongest impression upon the memory. 
I recollect an instance in the Faery Queen: — Una, 
wandering in search of the Red-Cross Knight, after 
traversing uninhabited wildernesses, discovers a path- 
way of beaten grass — 

In which the track of people's footing was. 
Again in the Italy of Mr. Rogers : — Twilight began 



152 JOURNAL OF 



to close round the poet after a day at Pompeii : and 
as lie stood by the house of Pansa, 

~ a ray, 
Bright and yet brighter, on the pavement glanc'd, 
And 071 the wheel-track worn for ce7iturieSf 
And on the stepping-stone from side to side, 
O'er which the maidens with their water-nrns 
Were wont to trip so hghtly ; full and clear 
The moon was rising, and at once revealed 
The name of every dweller and his craft. 

The grasSj worn by footsteps, gives life and beauty 
to the desert ; and the old wheel-track, seen in the 
moonlight, carries us into the city of the dead, as it 
exulted the morning of its strength. In the picture, 
as in the poem, slight circumstances allure and fasci- 
nate the eye. A book drawn by Bassano deceived 
one of the Carracci, who stretched out his hand to 
take it. In a Correggio at Florence, the Virgin is on 
her knees, desiring, yet fearing to rise, the Divine 
Infant having fallen asleep on the corner of her 
mantle, which had dropped to the ground. A land- 
scape of Euysdael frequently seems to be gathered 
into one ivy -grown pollard that moulders away through 
the canvas. Pepys mentions a flower-pot, by Simon 
Varelst, to which the dew-drops appeared to hang, so 
that he put his finger to them again and again, before 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 153 

he could be assured of the delusion of his eyes. The 
book that bewildered the artist, the child slumbering 
on the edge of the mantle, the broken trunk of the 
oak, and the sparkling drops on the flower, are so 
many shadows of leaves — slight circumstances, that 
charm the taste of the beholder. 

Little things in art and literature displease as 
much as they delight us. In the splendid description 
of the death of Laocoon, P. Knight thinks that Vir- 
gil misunderstood and debased the Greek sculptor's 
conception, by making the hero cry out under the 
grasp of the serpent. In the marble, the breast of 
Laocoon is expanded, and the throat is contracted, to 
show that the agonies which convulsed his frame were 
borne in silence. Bernini committed with his chisel 
the error of Virgil's pen. He gave a mean expres- 
sion to the statue of David, by showing him in the 
act of biting his under lip when he hurled the stone 
from the sling. Nor should we underrate such occa- 
sions of critical offence : whatever breaks the unity of 
interest in a book, statue, or picture, must detract by 
mutilation. In the great Vandyck, at Wilton, the 
escutcheon of the Pembroke family stares out from 
the corner. Cuyp, in a different way, weakened some 
of his finest landscapes by the unsoftened crimson of 
the central figure ; whereas Titian, more exquisitely 
skilful, melted his warm colours into the colder parts 
1^ 



154 JOURNAL OF 



of the composition. With a red scarf, or a little blue 
drapery, he subdued every feature, attitude, and cos- 
tume, into harmony and grace. 

Slight circumstances have a moral interest, as deep 
as it is varied. Retracing the current of old age to 
its early springs in childhood and youth, the memory 
still lingers on the shadows of the leaves. Warren 
Hastings, encircled by Indian splendour, and seeming 
to be absorbed in the cares of government, had always 
before his eyes a little wood at Daylesford, in Wor- 
cestershire, where he was born. It is not difficult to 
believe that Pope felt less pride in the subscription 
to his Homer, than in the one treasured shilling that 
Dry den gave to him, when a boy, for a translation 
from Ovid, 

This sylvan brook suggests another thought. A 
breath of wind, rustling the pendulous boughs, dis- 
perses all the reflections of leaves. Ruffle the surface, 
and the image flies. It is a subject of hourly experi- 
ence, that the bond of years is snapped in a moment. 
Baretti was always welcomed and praised by John- 
son ; he was the oldest friend he had in the world. 
The sharp edge of a witty tongue cut down this 
growth of time in ten minutes. Baretti, calling on 
the moralist, was rallied on the superior skill of Omai, 
the Otaheitan, who had conquered him at chess. In 
a storm of indignation, snatching up his hat and stick. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 155 

he rushed from the room, and never visited his friend 
any more. The stream grew tranquil, but the bough 
was broken. 

It might be profitable to inquire into the retard- 
ing or stimulating influence of insignificant sayings, 
praise, or blame, upon men in pursuit of knowledge 
and reputation. The reproof of a Wesleyan minister, 
scrawled on a window, caused Adam Clarke to aban- 
don his classical studies. During four years he never 
opened a book of learning ; even his Grreek Testa- 
ment was closed. Burke, rising to address the House 
with a roll of paper in his hand, was interrupted by a 
member, who deprecated the infliction of the MS. on 
his hearers. The orator, in shame and disgust, quit- 
ted his seat. Here are two leaves in the water. 
The scholar lost a precious season of improvement 
through the malice of a bigot ; and the statesman, 
who had been deaf to a lion, was disconcerted by a 
bray. 

A beam of the setting sun has just darted into 
the middle of the stream. The shadow of the leaf 
brightens, and an aureate tinge burnishes the water. 
I draw comfort and light from the appearance. Only 
a little ray has fallen on the brook, but it alters its 
colour. Experience points to the same illumination 
of the stream of life. Slight circumstances are its 
sunbeams. The seven Bishops, martyrs for con- 



156 JOURNAL OF 



science' sake, were committed to the Tower on a Fri- 
day. They reached the prison in the evening, just as 
Divine service was beginning ; and immediately has- 
tening to the chapel, were cheered by the words of 
St. Paul in the second lesson : " In all things approv- 
ing ourselves as the ministers of God, in much pa- 
tience, in afflictions, in distresses, in stripes, in impri- 
sonments." What blessings were breathed in every 
syllable ! Or take a different example. When the 
packet-ship. Lady Hobart, was driving before the hur- 
ricane, a white bird suddenly descended on the mast. 
The hearts of the crew were lightened ; hope dawned. 
Such consolation may be always mine. One bright, 
holy, faithful thought is my dove upon the mast. 
However sadly tossing over the waves of this trouble- 
some world, that vanishing bird of Paradise revives 
and strengthens me. It tells me that the storm will 
soon be over and gone, and the green land, with the 
time of the singing of birds, be come ! 

Men wear out their days and strength in seeking 
after happiness, but they have only to stoop and 
gather it up, or look inward and find it. I am struck 
by the Spanish discovery of the mines of Potosi. An 
Indian, pursuing deer, to save himself from slipping 
over a rock, seized a bush with his hand ; the violence 
of the wrench loosened the earth round the root, and 
a small piece of silver attracted his eye. He carried 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 157 



it home and returned for more. A torn-up shrub dis- 
closes a silver mine. In the waste places of our mor- 
tality, there is not a common flower which has not 
some precious ore at its root. We catch at the bro- 
ken reedj and the treasure appears. 

There is an Indian superstition illustrating very 
sweetly the wide-spreading fruitfulness of blessing 
and contentment. A plant grows in the jungle which 
emits a clear flame in the night. "To wanderers in 
the Himalaya mountains, it serves for a lamp, burning 
without oil." In a spiritual sense this luminous grass 
sheds green over our English villages, and skirts the 
flinty highways of swarming cities, if only it be 
sought after with loving and trustful eyes. Every- 
where the seed of hope and joy has been scattered by 
the Great Husbandman. Its blade shines in the 
darkest weather. Alas ! that men should trample it 
under foot ! — despising the lustre and guidance of 
little mercies, in their impatient pride to reach a 
broader and more magnificent thoroughfare ! 

Perhaps the familiar but touching anecdote of 
Mungo Park may give emphasis to the allegory. 
Stripped and plundered of his clothes in Africa, he 
sat down in despair. The nearest European settle- 
ment was five hundred miles off". What could he do? 
In the agony of his grief and desolation, he happened 
to look upon a small moss in flower. It was not 



158 JOURNAL OF 



larger than the top of one of his fingers — " Can that 
Being," he thought, "who planted, watered, and 
brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the 
world, a thing which appears of so small importance, 
look with unconcern upon the situation and sufferings 
of creatures formed after his own image." The 
meditation restored his courage ; he went on his way 
comforted and rejoicing, and soon arrived at a small 
village. The moss in flower was the shadow of a leaf 
upon the stream. 

I learn yet another lesson from these branches, 
which already begin to grow dim in the mirror. The 
road to home-happiness lies over small stepping- 
stones. Slight circumstances are the stumbling blocks 
of families. The prick of a pin, says a proverb col- 
lected by Fuller, is enough to make an empire in- 
sipid. The tenderer the feelings, the painfuller is 
the wound. An unkind word checks and withers the 
blossom of the dearest love, as the most delicate rings 
of the vine are troubled by the faintest breeze. The 
misery of a life is born of a chance observation. If 
the true history of quarrels, public and private, were 
honestly written, it would be silenced with an uproar 
of derision. The retainers of a Norman monastery 
fought and hated one another, during a hundred and 
forty years, for the right of hunting rabbits. 

There is a Tree, of which every leaf casts a heal- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 159 

ing shadow ; I shall not haye lost this balmy summer 
evening, if the mossy bridge, and gilded brook, and 
playful foliage remind me of it. Slight circum- 
stances compose the life of the Christian. His bless- 
ings, like his wishes, are on the ground. He stoops 
to pick them. 

I am returning to my loneliness happier than I 
left it. The future brightens. I feel that he can 
bear all things, who hopes all things. Hot sands are 
for the feet, and a stone for the head ; but the vision 
of angels shines over it. Even in dark times the 
beauty of Hope was felt. The antique finger drew 
her in the attitude of motion ; her garments drawn 
aside. She was always hastening forward ! Sweet 
traveller and guide to heaven ! take the lily of Eden 
in thy hand, and lead me whithersoever thou goest ! 

July 16th. — Dryden may be backed with Pope 
against any un-rhyming author in the language. His 
prose would make a reputation, with the poetry left 
out. After all, the admiration of Fox is not so un- 
accountable. What flexibility ! what vigour ! what 
harmony ! what fulness ! His language is the organ, 
with nearly all the stops. I have been reading, for 
the twentieth time, his parallel between poetry and 
painting. In reference to the scene in the iEneid, 
where the storm drives ^neas and Dido into the 



160 JOURNAL OF 



cavern, Dryden makes this remark : — " I suppose that 
a painter would not be much commended who should 
pick out this cavern from the whole ^neis. when he 
had better leave them in their obscurity than let in a 
flash of lightning to clear the natural darkness of the 
place, by which he must discover himself as much as 
them." 

An illustrious contemporary of Dryden — even 
Poussin — ^has selected this episode, and managed it 
with admirable taste. The composition of the picture 
is full of grandeur ; although the dark ground on 
which Poussin painted has communicated an excessive 
blackness to the colouring. But the effect is surpris- 
ing. The sudden gloom is relieved by light in the 
distant horizon, from which the tempest rushes before 
the wind. A white horse, a purple cloth upon it, is 
held by a Cupid with coloured wings, while the sun 
streams down from the clearing sky. Unfortunately, 
the horse is coarse and Flemish. Virgil mentions two 
horses — Dido's, and that on which the young Ascanius 
exults along the valley. Poussin gives only the horse 
of the Carthaginian queen, and leaves out the orna- 
ments : 

— Ostroque insignis et auro 
Stat sonipes — 

The " fulsere ignes," he translates very prettily into 
fluttering Loves. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 161 

July 1 7th. — Reminded this evening of that beau- 
tiful expression of Milton, about pluming the wings of 
thought, after being ruffled in the crowd. The mind 
revives in solitude. Fresh airs blow down upon it 
from the green hills and gardens of fancy. It gets its 
health and colour again, I would not quite recom- 
mend the advice of Cowley to be followed, for he con- 
sidered that man the happiest, who had not only 
quitted the metropolis, but abstained from visiting the 
next market-town of his county. We owe a debt to 
our brethren ; and, however fierce the beasts may be 
in the wilderness, we are not to surround ourselves 
with a wall of fire, and go to sleep in the centre. 
However, let me not be unjust to this most delightful 
writer. He knew how few people are fit for the soli- 
tariness he loved. In his essay on obscurity he 
says : — " They must have enough knowledge of the 
world to see the vanity of it, and enough virtue to 
despise its vanity ; if the mind be possest with any 
passions, a man had better be in a fair, than in a wood 
alone. They may, like petty thieves, cheat us, per- 
haps, and pick our pockets in the midst of company ; 
but, like robbers, they use to strip, and bind, and 
murder us, when they catch us alone. This is but to 
retreat from men, and fall into the hands of devils." 

And if sequesterment be necessary for our spir- 
itual, it is equally needed by our intellectual nature. 



162 JOURNAL OF 



A bird is shut up and darkened before it leaxns a 
tune ; trees and sun draw off its attention. The 
music of fancy is acquired in a similar manner. But 
the loneliness must be fed ; and the kind of nourish- 
ment is soon discovered. The purple feather of the 
bird tells of the seed. So it is in literature. The 
violets of Colonos peep out under the hedges of 
Milton's Eden. 

July 18th. — Most poetical readers know by heart 
Mr. Wordsworth's charming portraiture of womanly 
sweetness, which is able to cheer and bless us in all 
weathers of life. He has written nothing tenderer or 
truer — 

I saw her, upon nearer view, 

A spirit, yet a woman too. 

Her household motions light and free, 

And steps of virgin liberty ; 

A countenance in which did meet 

Sweet records, promises as sweet. 

A creature not too bright or good 

For human nature's daily food, 

For transient sorrows, simple wiles, 

Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles. 

The thought has been often uttered. First comes 
our excellent friend Groldsmithj introducing Dr. Prim- 
rose : " I had scarcely taken orders a year, before I 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTPcY. 163 

began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my 
wife as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy 
surface, but for such qualities as would wear well." 
Next appears Shenstone, in his Progress of Taste : — 

For humble ease, ye powers, I pray, 
That plain warm suit for every day ! 
And pleasure and brocade bestow, 
To flaunt it once a month or so. 
The first for constant wear we want ; 
The first, ye powers ! for ever grant. 
But constant wear the ]ast bespatters^ 
And turns the tissue into tatters. 

In Much Ado about Nothing, (Act ii. sc. 5,) Pedro 
asks Beatrice, " Will you have me, lady 1 " and she 
answers, " No, my lord, unless I might have another 
for working days. Your Grace is too costly to wear 
every day." To Mr. Wordsworth belongs the praise 
of bringing out the full charm of the sentiment. 

July 19th. — I am almost weary of watching 
The minute drops from off the eaves. 

A rainy day is a winter luxury. A cold, wet, hazy, 
blowing night in December, gates swinging, trees 
crashing, storm howling — that is enjoyable — it is the 
weather to finish Christabel in. How full of heat. 



164 JOURNAL OF 



light, and comfort everything is within doors ! The 
flickering fire, beaten into a blaze, the bubbling urn, 
the rustled book, and all the scenery of a thoughtful 
fireside, rise to the memory. Cowper describes the 
hour he delighted to lose in this waking dream, when 
he had drawn the chair up to the fender, and fastened 
the shutter, that still kept rattling. See him gazing 
earnestly into the sleepy fire ! — what is he looking at ? 
In the parlour twilight, the history of his boyhood 
and youth lives again, with the pleasant garden of the 
parsonage he was born in ; the path the gardener, 
Robin, drew him along to school ; and his mother, in 
that vesture of tissued flowers which he used to prick 
into paper with a pin. Sometimes his gayer heart 
disported itself in other dreams : — 

Me oft has fancy, ludicrous and wild, 

Soothed with a waking dream of houses, towers. 

Trees, churches, and strange visages, express'd 

In the red cinders, while with poring eye 

I gazed, myself creating what I saw. 

Not less amused have I, quiescent, watch'd 

The sooty films that play upon the bars 

Pendulous, and foreboding in the view 

Of superstition, prophesying still, 

Though still deceived, some stranger's near approach. 

I should like to see a catalogue of Hearth Liter- 
ature, if the title may be compounded. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 165 

Bright winter fires, that summer's part supply, 

is the pleasing line of Cowley. That parlour twilight 
is instead of the sun playing on leaves and grass. 
What visions have been created, books planned, pic- 
tures designed, cathedrals built, and countries dis- 
covered over dying embers ! Thoughts of eloquence 
and devotion, at this hour moving and shining along 
the world, were born in that glimmer. Ridley, watch- 
ing out the last red coal in his cell, may have seen 
the church rising in her stateliness and purity ; 
Raleigh have called up cities of gold, and forests of 
fruit-bearing trees ; and Milton, in the chimney-cor- 
ner at Horton, have sketched the dim outline of 
Comus. Therefore a wet winter evening is a very 
agreeable characteristic of the season. The wood- 
ashes are aids to reflection. But a rainy afternoon in 
summer is altogether different : it is the Faery's dan- 
cing-hall, with the lights extinguished. A paper 
network flutters where the fire ought to be : a red 
cinder for the parish-clerk to disappear in would be 
worth its weight in silver. But the eye wanders up 
and down, and finds nothing to rest upon ; the room 
itself wears a heavy, disconsolate expression ; the 
table and chairs are miserable ; the large fly mopes 
on the damp glass ; the flowers in the window look 
like mourners, just returned wet through from the 



166 JOURNAL OF 



funeral of Flora. Bamfylde lias painted the sorrows 
of the season : 

— Mute is the mournful plain ; 
Silent the swallow sits beneath the thatch, 
And vacant hind hangs pensive o'er his hatch, 
Counting the frequent drop from reeded eaves. 

July 20th. — Thanks to the Germans, we are be- 
ginning to be on visiting terms with the old Greek 
families. A scholar is now able to call on Pericles, 
and even to form a fair estimate of the domestic ar- 
rangements of the middle classes. The drawing-room 
and kitchen are being restored. Becker has done 
much for this branch of study. He sketches an Athe- 
nian lodging-house with something of Flemish mi- 
nuteness. A lasting value is given to his descriptions 
by the authority of the original authors, whose words 
he quotes. This is a feature of criticism not to be 
despised. He is a naturalist, looking off his lecture 
to point to the real specimens in glass cases. 

People are mistaken in supposing that Greek cities 
had no inns. In early times — the heroic ages — pri- 
vate hospitality entertained the wayfarer ; but, as in- 
tercourse increased, and strangers crowded to Athens 
and Corinth, ampler accommodation was required. 
The great festivals were the race-weeks of our county 
towns. We learn from a speech of ^schines, that the 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 167 

Athenian ambassadors to Philip took up their abode 
at an hotel ; just as the Papal Nuncio might have his 
apartments at Mivart's. 

We are reminded of the antiquity of all novelties, 
in the rage for autographs among Greek collectors. 
The bibliomaniac of Lucian pleased himself with 
thinking that he possessed the harangues of Demos- 
thenes, and the history of Thucydides, in the hand- 
writing of the respective authors. Thus the Rox- 
burgh Club had its type in a departed race ; and Will 
Wimble reappears in Athens with the same accumu- 
lating taste that excited the mirth of Sir Roger de 
Coverley. The shop and the counter have undergone 
slight changes. At Pompeii is, or was not long ago, 
the outline of a head with a pen stuck behind the ear, 
as one may see it every day in Reading. The Greek 
banker was a person of importance, and conducted his 
business on the most approved principle. He allowed 
a nominal interest on deposits, which he lent at a 
larger rate, — sometimes so high as thirty-six per cent. 
The circular note of Coutts had its original in the 
symbolon, or mark, that authenticated the letter of 
credit. The cheque was unknown ; but the leather 
token of Carthage promised the future food of specu- 
lation and commerce ; 

Blest paper credit ! last and best supply, 
That lends corruption lighter wings to fly. 



168 JOURNAL OF 



In-door life was extremely curious. An Oxford fel- 
low, arriving on a short visit to Alcibiades, would 
have been surprised at his bed-room. The four-post 
sinks into contempt. The Athenian bedstead was 
sometimes made of precious wood, with ivory feet. 
The mattras was stuffed with wool, and covered with 
linen or leathern sheets. The white pillow-case was 
not yet ; but the coverlets were splendid — sometimes 
composed of variegated feathers, perhaps like the 
Mexican cloaks. The table was usually round, ve- 
neered with maple, and supported by feet of bronze. 
An elegant tripod contained the fire which heated the 
chamber in cold weather. 

But the dinner-hour would have drawn forth all 
the wonder of the visitor. In the most fashionable 
establishment there was no table-cloth. A towel was 
handed round at the conclusion of the repast, but 
crumb of bread fulfilled the duty of the serviette. A 
particular kind of dough was set apart for the pur- 
pose. The custom, oddly enough, seems to corres- 
pond with one in Abyssinia, minutely recorded by 
Bruce, and confirmed by later travellers. In the ab- 
sence of knives and forks, spoons of gold were dis- 
tributed among the guests. The bread was handed 
in small baskets, woven of slips of ivory. The wine 
was cooled by lumps of snow, and the first toast was. 
To the Good Genius ! 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 169 

Becker vindicates the medical profession in Greece 
from the ridicule wMcli lias often been cast on it. 
The Romans, prejudiced against physicians, contented 
themselves with the healing wisdom of a domestic 
slave; or, like Cato, entrusted their health to the 
guardianship of a Latin Buchan. The Athenian, 
more nervous, was ahvays calling in the Doctor. A 
sort of diploma, in the form of a permission from the 
state, together with a certificate of attendance on 
medical lectures, was necessary to admit a candidate 
into practice. There were also physicians paid hy 
the government, and answering in some measure to 
our hospital or dispensary doctors. The Athenian 
physician was the general practitioner of modern 
times, and compounded his own medicines. Some 
patients came to the surgery ; others he attended at 
their own homes. His manners and speech appear to 
have been sufficiently rough and unflattering. The 
saying of a consulting-surgeon in remote years— 
^' Patroclus is dead, who was a much better man than 
you" — reads like an anticipatory reminiscence of Mr. 
Abernethy. But medical science was of the lowest 
order. It is a cpestion whether dissection was per- 
mitted. Becker alludes to a passage in Plutarch, 
describing an operation upon the larynx of a man 
who had swallowed a fish-bone ; and he notices the 
opening of the body of Aristomenes by the Lacedge- 
8 



170 JOURNAL OF 



monians, " to see whether it contained anything extra- 
ordinary." The late John Bell admitted that Hip- 
pocrates dissected apes. Haydon's first lecture on 
painting may be consulted for the anatomical know- 
ledge of Greek artists. He appeals to Burke, who 
said — " The author of Laocoon was as deeply skilled 
as Halle or Gauhius, and hence has been able to give 
that consistency of expression which prevails through 
the whole body, from the face, through every muscle, 
to the ends of the toes and fingers." 

It is remarkable that Hippocrates speaks of ac- 
quaintance with the physical constitution of man, as 
belonging less to the art of medicine than of design. 
Winckleman thought that ancient painters studied 
the forms of animals with reference to the human 
figure ; and he discovered in the heads of Jupiter 
and Hercules the characteristics of the lion and bull. 
Mr. Eastlake sees in the study of comparative ana- 
tomy the •' knowledge which would best enable them 
to define, and, therefore, to exaggerate, when neces- 
sary, the human characteristics." It should, how- 
ever, be remembered, that Sir Charles Bell, who be- 
stowed much thought on the anatomy and philosophy 
of expression, dissented from this view. 

But I must not prolong my stay in old Athens, 
although these glimpses of life, two or three thousand 
years old, cannot but be entertaining. After all, 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 171 

Cheapside is only a Greek street under another name. 
Even the toyshop was there, with every variety of 
playthings, from the ivory bed to the clay doll 
painted. Nursery rhymes were widely circulated ; 
and the veritable English " Bogy " enjoyed its reign 
of terror, as " Akko," or " Alphito." Perhaps a 
^^ Parent's Assistant," by a popular Greek Edge- 
worth, may yet reward some educational unroller of 
manuscripts. 

Meanwhile, the question naturally arises, why an- 
cient life and history are so rarely adapted to the 
purposes of instructive fiction. 

A tale of manners should refer to antiquity so re- 
mote as to become venerable, or present a vivid re- 
flection of scenes passing round us. The novel ac- 
cordingly has a twofold aspect, as it portrays the past 
or present — our ancestors or ourselves. And with 
regard to the former, it may be historical or domestic ; 
or both may be blended and interwoven ; the histori- 
cal being the pattern, and the domestic the thread it 
is worked in. Perhaps the Quentin Durward of Scott 
affords the happiest example of the united, as the 
Vicar of Wakefield of the separated, elements. Few 
travellers, however, have penetrated into the country 
of the rich ancients. Greek and Latin life, with one 
or two exceptions, remains unpainted. People know 
it chiefly from languid epics. 



172 JOURNAL OF 



The Anacharsis of Barthelemy is not free from the 
defect of Grlover. Becker compares his characters to 
antique statues, in French costume and lace ruffles. 
Telemachus still stands alone. 

July 21st. — Sitting under a tree this evening, 
with the Faery Queen in my hand, it was curious to 
watch the sunset falling like dew-drops through the 
boughs, and spotting the page with golden green. I 
remembered how often, at Cambridge, in the chapel 
of King's, I had read the Bible in the glow of the 
painted windows, until every letter seemed to be illu- 
minated like an old missal. Spenser ought to be 
studied as he wrote, in the sun. His system of com- 
position resembled the Venetian style of painting, as 
his rich epithets answer to his warmth of tone. His 
landscapes are English, with southern light streaming 
round them : 

ISTow when the rosy-fingered morning faire, 
Weary of aged Tithone's saffron bed, 
Had spread her purple robe through dewy aire, 
And the high hills Titan discovered. 

The blue robe of the morning, and the far-off purple 
rim of the hills, have the lucid depth and splendour 
of Titian. And if the colour of Spenser be Vene- 
tian, his combinations are often Flemish. A picture 
of Rubens is a commentary on a stanza. 



SUMMEP^ TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 173 



He has been justly regarded as our painter's poet. 
They who esteem him least^ admire his rare eye for 
effect and artistic arrangement. Hence Walpole told 
his arid correspondent, Mr. Cole, that he was building 
a bower, and feared that he must go and read Spen- 
ser, wading through all his allegories to get at a pic- 
ture. He would easily have found it. For Spenser 
is not the representative of a single school, but the 
abstract and epitome of each. The brilliant flush of 
his general manner belongs to Rubens ; his feminine 
expression reflects the serenity of Guido ; the melody 
of his language breathes the bloom of Correggio ; 
his wilder contortions of imagination recall the fierce 
audacity of Spranger ; and his dark sketches of ugli- 
ness and crime foretell Salvator Rosa. Not as we see 
him in the tossing pines, driving hurricanes, and 
swarthy brigands of his landscape ; but as he startles 
us in his historical portraits, especially in the " Regu- 
lus " at Cobham. I might add that Spenser's passion 
for sumptuous processions, splendid companies, and va- 
riegated festivals, proclaims his relationship to Paul 
Veronese, who was unsurpassed for his exquisite dis- 
posal of lights, Eastern dresses, and gorgeous array 
of priests and warriors. 

Spenser's portraits are, in the truest sense, Vene- 
tian. Titian, taking up the rude back grounds of 
Philippo Lippi, raised landscape-painting into a sepa- 



174 JOURNAL OF 



rate branch of art ; but the historical pencils succeeded 
equally in trees and nature. In the Faery Queen, 
the harmony between faces and scenery is striking. 
I venture to suggest another peculiarity in the poet's 
characters. The senatorial dignity of Titian's heads 
is felt by every spectator ; Spenser awakens the same 
feeling of awe and interest, by the beautiful haze of 
his allegory. The softening shade into which he with- 
draws his heroes and heroines, both deepens the lustre 
of their features, and lends a solemnity to their ex- 
pression. 

With all his beauties, he is not, and will not be, a 
favourite of the many. His cantos are never read 
for their story. The criticism of Pope's old Lady i^ 
still true. They are picture galleries. The eye of 
thoughtful taste never grows weary of them. It sinks 
down into the verdant depth of a stanza, as of the 
greenest landscape of Albano. But allegory has de- 
fects inherent and unconquerable. Gay worlds of 
fiction, hanging upon nothing, and launched into the 
wide expanse of imagination, must be shone over and 
warmed by common feelings and life. When that 
light and heat are wanting, the eye may be dazzled, 
but the heart is untouched. The reader strays 
through an enchanted garden sighing for the familiar 
voices of affection, and the charm of home-endear- 
ment. Like the Trojan exile in the Latin paradise, 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 175 

he opens his arms in vain to a shadowy Anchises ; 
and the child cannot embrace his father in the Ely- 
sium of fancy. 

These are the difficulties of parabolic description. 
If Spenser could not bend the boWj what hand may 
try !■ The English taste turns aside from allegory in 
its fairest form. Opie complained that no landscape 
was admired, except a view of some particular place ; 
and Payne Knight declared that he had seen more 
delight manifested at a piece of wax-work, or a mack- 
erel painted on a deal board, than he had ever ob- 
served to be excited by the Apollo or Transfiguration. 

July 22d. — Johnson says something about the 
impossibility of a conversationist being honest. No 
account can answer his cheques. To keep up appear- 
ances, he draws gold under another name. Talkers 
in books are not exempt from the difficulties or penal- 
ty of their brethren round the table. Henceforth, 
Mr. Sydney Smith must relinquish the most striking 
image in his famous portrait of a poor ecclesiastic : 
"A picture is drawn of a clergyman with 130/. per 
annum, who combines all moral, physical, and intel- 
lectual advantages ; a learned man, dedicating himself 
intensely to the care of his parish ; of charming man- 
ners and dignified deportment ; six feet two inches 
high, beautifully proportioned, with a magnificent 



176 . JOURNAL OF 



countenance, expressive of all the cardinal virtues 
and the Ten Commandments^ — (Works, T. iii. 200.) 
The proprietor of the phrase is Miss Seward, -in a let- 
ter to G. Hardinge, (T. ii. 250,) about a gentleman 
who was not so good as he looked : " So reserved as 
were his manners ! and his countenance ! a very 
tablet upon which the Ten Commandments seemed 
writtenP 

July 23d. — I never saw so many glow-worms to- 
gether as on this balmy evening ; and their sparkle 
is unusually vivid, occasioned, I suppose, by the deli- 
cious weather ; for the glow-worm grows brighter or 
dimmer, as the air is warmer or colder. All the bank 
is on fire with these diamonds of the night, as Darwin 
calls them. If Titania had overturned a casket of 
jewels in a quarrel with Oberon the grass would not 
have looked gayer. Thomson describes the appear- 
ance with his usual liveliness : 

Among the crooked lanes, on ev'ry hedge 

The glow-worm lights his gem, and through the dark 

A moving radiance twinkles. 

Perhaps he is slightly astray in his zoology ; for al- 
though the male has two spots of faint lustre, the 
female is the real star of the wood-path. A double 
portion of light is her compensation for the loss of 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 177 

wings. Her lamp is to bring to her the friend she is 
unable to visit. She may be seen in a summer even- 
ing climbing up a blade of grass, to make herself 
more conspicuous. Good Mr. White, of Selborne, 
compared her to the classic lady who lighted the 
tower across the Hellespont, and of whom such pretty 
stories are related. 

Coleridge, in a note to one of his own poems — 

Nor now, with curious sight, 
I mark the glow-worm as I pass 
Move with green radiance through the grass, 

An emerald of light, 

drew attention to Wordsworth's epithet of green^ ap- 
plied to the light of this insect. Whereupon Miss 
Seward wrote to Gary, in 1798, "That light is per- 
fectly stellar; and Ossian calls the stars green in 
twenty parts of his poetry, published before Words- 
worth, who is a very young man, was born." The 
same ingenious lady mentions her feeling of surprise, 
in childhood, at finding the verdant colour of the 
stars and glow-worms unobserved by poetic eyes. 
And certainly she appears to have forestalled Words- 
worth, in a line of her Llangollen Vale : 

While glow-worm lamps effuse a pale green light. 

After all it is only a question of reproduction ; the 

8* 



178 JOURNAL OF 



green brightness is a literal translation of Lucre- 
tius. 

The "twinkle" of Thomson is quite as illustra- 
tive ; and in a Latin poem, written a hundred years 
ago, by a Mr. Bedingfield, the glow-worm is shown 
casting a tremulous gleam along the wet path. This 
wavering uncertainty arises out of the power it has of 
withdrawing its light, as instinct may suggest. Grlow- 
worms are the food of night-birds, which of course 
track them by their shining. To put out the candle, 
therefore, is the surest way of escaping the robber ; 
and, perhaps, their apprehension of enemies may 
account for the short time of their illumination. Mr, 
Nowell quotes a curious experiment of White, who 
carried two glow-worms from a field into his garden, 
and saw them extinguish their lamps between eleven 
and twelve o'clock. Later entomologists confirm this 
singular relation. If an anthology were woven about 
glow-worms, Shakspere would scarcely be allowed to 
compete for the prize. He never notices them with- 
out some incorrectness. His strangest mistake was 
placing the light in the eyes ; whereas a momentary 
glance would have convinced him that it proceeded 
from the tail. 

But I have been turning glow-worms to an use 
this evening, which no naturalist probably ever 
thought of — reading the Psalms by their cool green 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 179 

radiance. I placed six of the most luminous insects I 
could find in the grass at the top of the page ; mov- 
ing them from verse to verse^ as I descended. The 
experiment was perfectly successful. Each letter 
became clear and legible, making me feel deeply and 
gratefully the inner life of the Psalmist's adoration : 
" Lord, how manifold are thy works, in wisdom hast 
thou made them all ; the earth is full of thy good- 
ness." 

I know that poetry has turned the fire-fly into a 
lantern. Southey enables Madoc to behold the fea- 
tures of his beautiful guide by the flame of two fire- 
flies, which she kept prisoners in a cage, or net of 
twigs, underneath her garments. But, surely, I am 
the discoverer of the glow-worm-taper. And it answers 
the purpose admirably. By the help of this emerald 
of the hedge-row and mossy bank, I can read, not only 
the hymns of saints to Grod, but God's message to me. 
As the glittering grass of the Indian hills taught me 
wisdom, so these glow-worms are a light to my feet 
and a lantern to my path. I ought to employ my 
every-day blessings and comforts as I have been using 
these insects. I could not have read " Even-Song" 
among the trees by night, unless I had moved the 
lamp up and down. One verse shone, while the rest 
of the page was dark. Patience alone was needed. 
Line by line, the whole Psalm grew bright. What a 



180 JOURNAL OF 



lesson and consolation to me in my journey through 
the world ! Perhaps to-day is a cloudy passage in 
my little calendar : I am in pain^ or sorrow of mind 
or body ; my head throb s, or my heart is disquieted 
within me. But the cool sequestered paths of the 
Gospel Garden are studded with glow-worms; I have 
only to stoop and find them. Yesterday was health- 
fuller and more joyous. My spirits were gayer ; my 
mind was peacefuller ; kind friends visited me ; or 
God seemed to lift up the light of His countenance 
upon me. These recollections are my lanterns in the 
dark. The past lights up the present. I move my 
glow-worms lower on the page, and read to-day by 
yesterday. 

Not for myself only should these thoughts be 
cherished. Every beam of grace that falls upon my 
path ought to throw its little reflection along my 
neighbour's. Whatever happens to one is for the 
instruction of another. Even the glow-worm, hum- 
blest of starSj has its shadow. Boyle, the friend of 
Evelyn, makes some excellent remarks on the spiritual 
eloquence of woods, fields, and water, and all their 
swarming inhabitants. They who pass summer-time 
in the country are especially called to listen and look. 
The man who goes forth to his work and labour until 
the evening, has his teacher by his side. The hay- 
makers who — 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 181 

Drive the dusky wave along the mead, 

may remind him of the penitent, who said that his 
heart was withered like grass, so that he forgot to eat 
his bread ; the leafy elm, that shelters the noon-day 
rest of the reaper, should tell him how the man who 
stood not in the way of sinners is to be " like a tree 
planted by the water-side, of which the leaf shall not 
wither ;" and the orchard, that gives shade and fra- 
grance to the cottage door, ought to speak of that ri- 
pening warmth of Christian faith, which is to " bring 
forth more fruit in its age." 

When a devout heart knows really how and what 
to observe, it has advanced a great way towards the 
comprehension and application of the Apostle's assu- 
rance, that " all things work together for good to them 
that love God." The glow-worm, like the star, has 
its speech and language. The Christian is at church 
in his toil and in his loneliness ; when the sun shines 
or the moon rises. The foot of his ladder may rest 
on a tuft of grass, or a few flowers, but the top reaches 
to heaven. Most happy are they 

To whom some viewless teacher brings 
The secret lore of rural things. 

I am not interested by any feature of Luther's 
private character, so much as by his affectionate and 



182 JOURNAL OF 



thoughtful contemplation of nature. A hough loaded 
with cherries^ and put on his table, a few fishes from 
a pond in his garden, a rose or other flower, awoke in 
his breast feelings of gratefulness and piety towards 
Him, who sends sunshine and dew upon the just and 
the unjust. One evening, when he saw a bird perch- 
ing itself on a branch for the night, he exclaimed — 
^' That little bird has chosen his shelter, and is about 
to go to sleep in tranquillity ; it has no disquietude, 
neither does it consider where it shall rest to-morrow 
night, but it sits in peace on that slender bough, leav- 
ing it to Grod to provide for its wants." This is the 
very temper inculcated in the Divine exhortation, 
" Consider the lilies how they grow?^ 

July 24th. — I have no strong confidence in the 
literary truth of Mr. Pinkerton, but I thank him for 
Walpole's lively letter, June 25, 1785. The critical 
opinions are pleasant and sparkling when they are false. 
He traces Virgil's reputation to grace of style : — "A 
Roman farmer might not understand the Georgics, but 
a Roman courtier was made to understand farming ; 
and Virgil could captivate a lord of Augustus's bed- 
chamber." This is good ; but Walpole had imperfect 
views of the Latin epic. He denied its power over 
the passions, although the writer's genius lay chiefly 
in the pathetic. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 183 

He sees the colouring of Albano in Milton's Eden. 
And there is an air of serious purity about his land- 
scapes that may justify the simile. Everything 
breathes of repose : 

— iimbrageous grots, and caves 
Of cool recess, o'er which the mantling vine 
Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps 
Luxuriant: meanwhile murm'ring waters fall 
Down the slope hills, dispers'd, or in a lake, 
That to the fringed bank with myrtle crowned 
Her crystal mirror holds, unite their streams. 

The most pleasing circumstance connected with Al- 
bano is the anecdote told of him by Felibien — that his 
beautiful wife was his model for G-races, and his chil- 
dren for Cherubs. It is interesting to contrast his 
solemn hues and brooding stillness of trees with the 
works of the Flemish painters, whose favourite subject 
was also Paradise ; by which they understood a 
breadth of country bright with every shade of vegeta- 
tion — 

Gay tinted woods their massive foliage threw ; 
Breathed but an air of heaven, and all the grove 
As if instinct with living spirit grew, 
Rolling its yerdant gulfs of every hue. 

Walpole finds in the swan an emblem of Racine : 
^' The colouring of the swan is pure ; his attitudes are 



184 



JOURNAL OF 



graceful ; he never displeases you when sailing on his 
proper element. His feet are ugly ; his walk not nat- 
ural. He can soar, but it is with difficulty Still, 
the impression a swan leaves is that of grace. So 
does Racine." Gray placed him next to Shakspere ; 
and Mr. Hallam thinks that in one passage, where 
they have both taken the same idea from Plutarch, 
the French poet has excelled his English brother : — 



Shakspere. 

Thy demon, that's the spirit 

that tempts thee, is 
Noble, courageous, high, un- 

matchable, 
Where Caesar is not ; but near 

him, thy angel 
Becomes a fear, as being o'er- 

powered. 



Racine. 



Mon genie etonnd tremble de- 
vant le sien. 



Certainly the single line of Racine embodies a larger 
spirit than Shakspere's four. In the art of expression, 
no comparison can be allowed. The style of Racine 
is faultless. Excessive art gives artlessness. 

Walpole's habits of thought and study contracted 
his critical vision. What he did see he saw clearly. 
But a small circle bounded his view. We find him 
here ridiculing Thomson. He proposed a parallel 
for the Seasons and Pleasures of Imagination in the 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 185 

Kings of Hearts and Diamonds ; dressed in robes of 
gaudy patches tliat do not unite, and only differing 
from the Knaves by the length of their trains. Aken- 
side may fight his own battles ; but think of a man of 
elegance — who set the fashion in taste — presuming to 
insult one of the truest poets who ever struck a lyre ! 
Every day adds new strength to the judgment of 
Pope, that the faculty of understanding a poem is not 
less a gift than that of writing it. 

However, literary history keeps Walpole in coun- 
tenance. People have neither eyes nor ears for tal- 
ents they are without. Crabbe, who was domesticated 
with Burke in the splendour of his genius and fame — 
sauntering with him through the garden or resting 
upon stiles — had treasured up no sayings of his won- 
derful friend. That conversation, which excited the 
alarm and quickened the indolence of Johnson, melted 
like snow from the memory of the poet. Barrow had 
no sympathy with Dryden, and Shenstone could not 
discover the humour of Cervantes. But a more ex- 
traordinary instance of a taste paralysed on one side 
occurs in the Epistle of Collins to Sir Thomas Han- 
mer, upon his edition of Shakspere. He refuses him 
any power of depicting womanly character. The 
soft touch of Fletcher might lay bloom on the cheek 
of beauty; but Shakspere's pencil was suited only to 
imbrown coarser manhood : — 



186 JOURNAL OF 



Of softer mould the gentle Fletcher came,- 

The next in order, as the next in name ; 

With pleased attention, midst his scenes we find 

Each glowing thought that warms the female mind ; 

His ev'rj strain the Smiles and Graces own. 

But stronger Shakspere felt for man alone. 

What is Walpole's sneer at Thomson to this ? And 
who will hereafter complain of critical insensibility, 
or twisted eyesight ? The author of the Odes to the 
Passions and Evening was blind and deaf to Miranda, 
Imogen, Constance, Juliet, Desdemona, Katherine, 
and the long gallery of nature's beauties. 

One poet there was whom Walpole could compre- 
hend and admire with all his heart — Dr. Darwin. 
He told Hannah More that the Botanic Garden was 
an admirable poem, abounding in similes, '^ beautiful, 
fine, and sometimes sublime." The Triumph of Flora 
he considered to be^'enchantingly imagined ;" and the 
description of the creation of the world out of chaos, 
to be the grandest passage in any author or language ! 
Thomson is a king of diamonds, with a train ; and 
Darwin is the brother and companion of Milton. I 
am not running down the Lichfield Claudian. His 
talents were great. In his own way he is surprising. 
In a certain theatrical splendour of impersonation,* 
such as the man escaping from a house on- fire — 

Pale danger glides along the falling roof — 



SUMMEK, TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 187 

he may be compared with Mason. His descriptions 
of the infant on the mother's breast, the array of 
Cambyses in the desert, and Love riding on the lion, 
are worthy of being remembered with Gray. He is 
astonishingly happy in occasional epithets, as when he 
speaks of the bristling plumes of the eagle. I may 
say of him, in the language of one of his friends, even 
more grandiloquent than himself, though shrewd and 
clever withal — His poetry " is a string of poetical 
brilliants ; but the eye will be apt to want the inter- 
stitial black velvet to give effect to their lustre." 
And now that the gossip of his flatterers about the 
"softness of Claude," the "sublimity of Salvator," 
&c., is forgotten, criticism may fairly give him his 
due. Gary compared the Botanic Garden to a picture 
by Breughel — flower or velvet Breughel, as he was 
called. And the resemblance is obvious. If Darwin 
had painted a Madonna and Child, he would have put 
them, as Breughel did, in a garland of flowers. 

He worked after a bad pattern. Akenside was 
his favourite. An universal glitter strikes the eye. 
The reader feels that oppression of light which Gray 
apprehended in his own splendid fragment on Educa- 
tion and Government. Where all is finished and all 
shines, the general effect fails, by wanting the chiaro- 
scuro. 



188 JOURNAL OF 



July 26th. — Tlie longer we live among books and 
men, the less we ought to be surprised by anything 
we read or hear. Bu.t this morning my caution was 
quite overturned by a philosopher and a poet. Thus 
writes Sir Thomas Brown : — " Another misery there 
k in affection, that whom we truly love like ourselves 
we forget 'their looks, nor can our memory retain the 
idea of their faces ; and it is no wonder, for they are 
ourselves, and our affection makes their looks our 
own." And this is the commentary of Mr. Cole- 
ridge : — '^ A thought I have often had, and once ex- 
pressed it in a line. The fact is certain." Strange 
delusion ! The words should be reversed. Rather 
say : — We forget our own faces in the faces of those 
whom we love. We disappear in them — have no liv- 
ing, breathing existence, apart from theirs. Our re- 
collection is not limited to the features, the shape of 
the countenance, the complexion. Nothing has faded. 
The colour of the eyes in the changefulness of plea- 
sure, sadness, health, or pain, lives before us, as if 
Titian or Lely had kept watching them with a pencil. 
No canvas absorbs colours like memory. It makes 
every thing minister to itself A field-path, a seat 
under trees, a garden-bed, a particular flower, recall 
the posture, the look, even the glow, of sunset, or 
fainter moonshine, that tinged the cheek or hair of a 
dear companion in some hour of unusual interest. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 189 

John NewtoHj Cowper's friend, said, in after life, that 
the face of the young girl whom he so passionately 
loved, used to shine down upon the lonely deck as he 
stood at the wheel, steering the ship through the tem- 
pest. Amid foam and lightning, or the dreadfuller 
storms of his own troubled spirit, there was she — re- 
buking, cheering, and blessing him. 

This reviving influence applies, in a pathetic ful- 
ness, to the departed — the lost. Aflection has its 
pure crystal, never stained or broken except in death. 
The hand and the mirror fall together. On this bright 
surface of love's remembrance, we behold our friends 
with the clearness of natural faces reflected in a glass ; 
and we see them in connexion with the parting, closing 
scene. That room may have crumbled before the 
hammer, or the saw ; its furniture may be scattered 
or destroyed. But for us all things remain as they 
were. Not a chair has been moved ; not a fold of 
drapery has been rumpled by time. The Bible lies 
open upon the bed ; the book of prayer has the fa- 
miliar page turned down ; the watch hangs by the 
pillow ; the '' asking eye" turns to ours ! Thus, 
indeed, affection makes the dear faces always present 
to us ; and instead of their looks being effaced, we 
forget our own. 

July 27th. — The " Homeric" question, as I may 



190 JOURNAL OF 



call it, seems to be the silliest that ever was put to a 
critical vote. Schlegel denied that the poet was blind 
— Coleridge, that he lived. One gives him eyes ; the 
other takes his life. They who adopt the Grerman 
theory of multiplied authorship must be ignorant of 
the unity of the Iliad. It is as much built on a plan 
as St. Paul's ; the master-mind is felt in every part. 
It would be as true to call Wren a concrete name for 
the bricklayers of the Cathedral, as Homer a tradi- 
tional synonyme with the Iliad. However, I have 
nothing to do with the quarrels of ingenious persons, 
poetical or otherwise : — 

'Twere wiser far 
For me, enamour'd of sequester'd scenes 
And charm'd with rural heauty, to repose 
Where chance may throw me, beneath elm or vine, 
My languid limbs when summer sears the plains ; 
Or when rough winter rages, on the soft 
And sheltered sofa, while the nitrous air 
Feeds a blue flame, and makes a cheerful hearth. 

I only allude to the controversy for the sake of a 
very admirable remark of Pope, in his Preface — that 
circumstances swiftly rising up to the eye of Homer, 
had their impressions taken off at a heat. That di- 
lation and spreading abroad of description, which is 
known to taste under the name of " circumstance," 
forms an important element of poetic art. We see it 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 19 i 

in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales ; the Prioress, 
her coral on her arm ; the Frere, in semi-cope of 
double worsted ; the Poor Scholar ; the wife of Bath, 
— each has the distinctiveness of Vandyck. Reynolds 
condemns this minuteness. But who was more obser- 
vant than Titian of each separate colour and shade, 
even in a velvet or stuff? S. del. Piombo gives, in 
one of his portraits, five tints of black, — each care- 
fully discriminated. " Circumstance" is found most 
abundantly in that poet to whom Pope's criticism 
applied. It comes out with startling vividness in the 
dress and weapons of his chieftains. He tries the 
temper of a sword with the delight of an armourer. 
We notice the same military feeling in Ariosto ; yet 
the Paladins of the Orlando do not charm us like the 
heroes of the Iliad. The Italian wanted seriousness ; 
he had not the undoubting mind of Homer. When 
he girds on a sword, he turns aside to conceal a smile. 
Spenser, with his pausing, earnest step, approaches 
nearer to his Grreek ancestor. Look at Tristram (F. 
Q., b. vi. canto 2, stanza 39) bending over the dead 
knight : 

Long fed his greedy eyes with the fair sight 
Of the bright metal, shining like sun-rays, 
Handling and turning them a thousand ways. 

This is in the truest spirit of Ajax plundering 



192 JOURNAL OF 



a Trojan. The taking of " impressions off at a heat" 
is also conspicuous in the Homeric battles and wounds. 
In the sixteenth book of the Iliad, Patroclus, leaping 
from his chariot, seized a stone^ which his hand 
covered. 

It is in the nature of " circumstance" to attract 
every little thing towards it. Nothing is too common. 
Mr. Keble, in one of his Preelections (ix.), suggests a 
happy illustration from the history of Madame de la 
Rochejacqueline, so famous in the sad story of La 
Vendee. Overwhelmed by grief, plundered of her 
property, and flying from cruel enemies, she never- 
theless adds, that while following the litter of her 
wounded husband, her feet were pinched by tight 
shoes. 

The descriptions which are natural in Homer, be- 
come picturesque in his successors. He indicates — 
they delineate. He hastily touches a figure into the 
picture — they bestow skill and toil upon the back- 
ground and accessories. He produces his effect by 
single strokes. The slender tongue of his wolves is 
the one scratch of the Master. They work out their 
design by composition and costume, light and shade. 
The following specimens, from two most dissimilar 
writers, will show the artistic quality of the poetical 
mind in its elements : — 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 



193 



MATERIALS FOR LAND- 
SCAPE. 

DAUWIN. 

The rush thatched- cottage on 
the purple moor, 

Where ruddy children frolic 
round the door ; 

The moss-grown antlers of the 
aged oak, 

The shaggy locks that fringe 
the colt unbroke, 

The bearded goat, with nim- 
ble eyes, that glare 

Through the long tissue of his 
hoary hair. 

As with quick foot he climbs 
some ruin'd wall. 

And crops the ivy which pre- 
vents its fall, — 

With rural charms the tran- 
quil mind delight, 

And form a picture to th' ad- 
miring sight. 



CIRCUMSTANCE. 

TENNYSON. 

Two children in two neigh- 
bour Tillages 
Playing mad pranks along the 

heathy leas ; 
Two strangers meeting at a 

festival ; 
Two lovers whispering by an 

orchard wall ; 
Two lives bound fast m one 

with golden ease ; 
Two graves grass-green beside 

a gray church-tower, 
Wash'd with still rains, and 

daisy-blossomed ; 
Two children in one hamlet 

born and bred ; 
So runs the round of life from 

hour to hour. 



I tbink that Gilpin's definition of tbe Picturesque 
is sufficiently accurate ; — that it includes all objects 
which please from some quality capable of being illus- 
trated in painting. The suggestion of Sir Joshua 
KeynoldSj that " Picturesque is somewhat synonymous 
to the word taste," I am quite unable to understand ; 

9 



194 



JOURNAL OF 



although his remark is obviously just, that Michael 
Angelo and Raffaelle have nothing of it ; while Ru- 
bens and the Venetian painters exhibit it in every va- 
riety of shape and combination. That the Picturesque 
is distinct from the sublime or beautiful, cannot be 
questioned. A certain roughness and irregularity are 
necessary to its existence. An old mill, with intri- 
cate wood-work, clinging mosses, weather-strains, and — 

The dark round of the dripping wheel ; 

the dim broken lights of a cathedral ; the glimmering 
hollows and shattered branches of trees ; rough-hewn 
park-pales, — Each and all of these are features of the 
Picturesque. Salvator Rosa and Rubens may repre- 
sent it in painting — Spenser and Akenside in poetry. 
If classic literature be included, Virgil would stand 
at the head of the school. Taking, therefore. Pictu- 
resque to mean any object, or group, susceptible of 
representation by pencil or colour, the following, added 
to the preceding specimens, will display it under its 
most striking manifestations : — 



A LARK SINGING IN A 
RAINBOW. 

WARTON. 

Fraught with a transient fro- 
zen shower, 
If a cloud should haply lower, 



A CLOUD KINDLED BY 

THE SUN. 

AKENSIDE. 

— as when a cloud 
Of gathering hail, with limpid 
crusts of ice 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 



195 



WARTON. 

Sailing o'er the landscape dark, 

Mute on a sudden is the lark ; 

But when gleams the sun 
again 

O'er the pearl-besprinkled 
plain ; 

And from behind his watery 
veil 

Looks through the thin de- 
scending hail ; 

She mounts, and, lessening to 
the sight. 

Salutes the blithe return of 

light, 

And high her tuneful track 
pursues 

Through the rainbow's melt- 
ing hues. 



AKENSIDE. 

Enclosed, and obvious to the 

beaming sun, 
Collects his large effulgence, 

straight the heavens 
With equal flames present on 

either hand. 
The radiant visage, Persia 

stands at gaze 
Appall' d, and on the brink of 

Ganges doubts 
The snowy vested seer in Mi- 

thra's name. 
To which the fragrance of the 

South shall rise, 
To which his warbled orisons 

ascend. 



A FACE m THE WATER. 

MILTON. 

— I thither went 
With unexperienced thought, 

and laid me down 
On the green bank, to look 

into the clear 
Smooth lake, that to me seem- 
ed another sky, 



A FOG SCENE. 

THOMSON. 

— the dim-seen river seems 
Sullen and slow to roll the 

misty wave. 
Even in the height of noon 

oppress' d, the sun 
Sheds weak, and blunt, his 

wide-refracted ray ; 



196 



JOURNAL OF 



MILTON. 

As I bent down to look, jnst 

opposite 
A shape within the wat'iy 

gleam appeared 
Bending to look on me; I 

started back, 
It started back ; but pleased I 

soon retm'n'd ; 
Pleased it returned as soon 

with answering looks 
Of sympathy and love — there 

I had fixed 
Mine eyes till now, and pin'd 

with vain desire. 
Had not a voice thus warn'd 

me — 



THOMSON. 

Whence glaring oft, with ma- 
ny a broaden'd orb, 

He frights the nations. 
Indistinct on earth, 

Seen through the turbid air 
beyond the life 

Objects appear — and 'wilder' d 
o'er the waste 

The shepherd stalks gigantic ; 
till at last 

Wreath' d dim around, in deep- 
er circles still 

Successive closing, sits the gen- 
eral fog. 

Unbounded o'er the world. 



THE DOOM OF LADURLAD. 

SOUTHET. 

There, where the Curse had 
stricken him. 

There stood the miserable 
man. 
There stood Ladurlad, with 
loose hanging arms 

And eyes of idiot wander- 
ing. 

Was it a dream ? alas ! 



A SEA VIEW. 

DYER, 

— with easy course 
The vessels glide, unless their 

speed be stopped 
By dead calms, that oft lie on 

those smooth seas, 
While every zephyr sleeps, 

Then the shrouds drop ; 
The downy feather on the 

cordage hung 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 



197 



SOUTHEY. 

He heard the river flow, 
He heard the crumbling of the 

pile, 
He heard the wind which 
showered 
The thin white ashes round. 
There motionless he stood, 
As if he hoped it were a dream, 
And feared to move lest he 
should prove 
The actual misery ; 
And still at times he met Ke- 

hama's eye, 
Kehama's eye that fastened 
on him still. 



DYER. 

Moves not ; the flat sea shines 

like yellow gold 
Fused in the fire, or like the 

marble floor 
Of some old temple wide ; but 

where so wide. 
In old or later time, its marble 

floor 
Did ever temple boast as this, 

which here 
Spreads its bright level many 

a league around. 
At solemn distances its pillars 

rise, 
Sofala's blue rocks, Mozam- 

bic's palmy steeps. 
And lofty Madagascar's glit- 
tering shores. 



July 29tli. — Renewed my acquaintance with Bos- 
suet's noblest sermon upon the Resurrection. How 
opposite the whole system of French eloquence is to our 
own! The Henriade to Paradise Lost — Corneille to 
Shakspere ! Perhaps the aptest parallel might be 
found in Pere la Chaise and the churchyard of an 
English village. One is recognised by its dressed 
walks, bouquets of flowers, and sentimental inscrip- 
tions ; the other by daisies, heaps of turf, and moni- 
tory texts, strewed over " the rude forefathers of the 



198 



JOURNAL OF 



hamlet." Sparkling conceitSj artificial blossomSj and 
tragic sorrow, abound even in tlie master -pieces of 
Bossuetj Massillon, and Flechier. Sterne hit the false 
taste of the French pulpit in Mr. Shandy's comment 
on the Corporal's discourse: "'I like it well — 'tis 
dramatic, and there is something in that way of wri- 
ting, when skilfully managed, which catches the atten- 
tion.' 'We preach much in that way with us,' said 
Dr. Slop. ' I know that very well,' said my father, 
but in a tone and manner which disgusted Dr. Slop, 
full as much as his assent, simply, would have pleased 
him." 

But Pere la Chaise is shone over by the sun. 
That, at least, is natural and true. And the sermon 
often brightens up with the warmth of genuine feeling 
or imagination. The following picture of a journey 
of life is coloured with exceeding power. I give a 
hasty and free copy — an engraving of a picture : — 



La vie humaine est sembla- 
ble a un chemin, dont Tissue 
est un precipice aifreux; on 
nous en avertit d^s le premier 
pas ; mais la loi est prononce ; 
il faut avancer tou jours. Je 
voudrois retourner sur mes 
pas: "Marche! Marche!" Un 
poids invincible, une force in- 



Human life resembles a path 
that ends in a frightful preci- 
pice. We are warned of it 
from our first step; but the 
law is passed — we must ad- 
vance always. I would re- 
trace my steps — ** Forward! 
Forward !" An irresistible 
weight and energy drag us 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 



199 



vincible, nous entraine ; il fant 
sans cesse avancer vers le pre- 
cipice. Mille traverses, mille 
peines nous fatiguent, et nous 
inquidtent dans la route ; en- 
core si je pouvois eviter ce 
precipice afFreux. Non, non, 
il faut marcher ; il faut courir ; 
telle est la rapidite des annees. 
On se console pourtant, parce- 
que de temps en temps, on 
rencontre des objets, qui nous 
divertissent, des eaux couran- 
tes, des fleurs qui passent, on 
voudroit arreter. "Marche! 
Marche!" Et cependant on 
voit tomber derriere soi tout 
ce qu'on avoit passer; fracas 
efFrojable, inevitable ruine. 
On se console parcequ'on em- 
porte quelques fleurs cueillies 
en passant, qu'on voit se faner 
entre ses mains, du matin au 
soir; quelques fruits qu'on 
perd en les goutants ; en- 
chantement ! Toujours en- 
traine on approcbe du gouffre ; 
ddjcL tout commence a s'effa- 
cer; les jardins sont moins 
fleuris, les fleurs moins bril- 
lantes, leurs couleurs moins 
vives, les prairies moins rian- 



along. For ever we draw 
nearer to the precipice. Thou- 
sand disappointments, thou- 
sand difficulties fatigue and 
disquiet us in the journey. 
Oh, that I could escape this 
terrible precipice. No, no! 
still on. You must run, so 
swift is the current of years. 
Now and then, objects divert 
us — flowing streams, passing 
flowers ; we would halt, " For- 
ward ! Forward!" Meanwhile, 
we see behind us everything 
falling as soon as passed — 
frightful crash, inevitable des- 
olation ! Some flowers, snatch- 
ed in the morning, perish in 
our hands before night ; some 
fruits we find, but they die in 
tasting. Strange enchantment ! 
Always hurried on, we draw 
nigh to the gulf. Already ev- 
erything waxes faint, and goes 
out. Gardens grow less live- 
ly, flowers less brilliant, mead- 
ows less gay, waters less clear. 
Everything fades : everything 
disappears. . The shadow of 
death meets us; we begin to 
feel that the gulf is near. One 
step further — to the edge! 



200 



JOURNAL OF 



tes, les eaux moins clairs ; tout 
se ternit; tout s'efface; I'om- 
bre de la mort se presente ; on 
commence k sentir I'approclie 
du gouffre fatal : Mais il faut 
aller sur le bord, encore nn 
pas. D^ja rhorreur trouble 
les sens; la tete tourne; les 
yeux s'egarent; il faut mar- 
cher. On voudroit retourner 
en arriere; plus de moyen; 
tout est tombe ; tout est eva- 
noui; tout est ^cbappe. Je 
n'ai b«soin de vous dire que 
ce chemin, c'est la Yie; que 
ce gouffre c'est la Mort. 



Already the soul is dismayed ; 
the head turns ; the eyes wan- 
der. But on ! We would turn 
back — we cannot ! All is fal- 
len, all is vanished, all is 
slipped away. I need not say 
to you that this Road is — 
Life ; that this Gulf is — Death. 



Mr. Rogers has paraphrased this description in 
Human Life without preserving the grandeur of the 
original. The amplification of French prose destroys 
the refining processes of poetry. The gold is already 
beaten out. Ogilvie mentions a sermon by Fordyce, 
where the death of a wicked man is portrayed with 
strokes worthy of Demosthenes. And he quotes the 
following as one of the most picturesque images ever 
seized on by a sublime imagination : " The dreadful 
alternative entirely misgives him ; he meditates the 
devouring abyss of eternity ; he recoils as he eyes 
it." The italics are Ogilvie's. Whatever be the 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 201 

merit of the image, it is due to Bossuet, whom For- 
dyce copied. 

July 30th. — Mr. "Wordsworth sings in musical 
verse — 

The blackbird in the summer trees, 

The lark upon the hill, 
Let loose their carol when they please, 

Are quiet when they will. 
With nature never do they wage 

A foolish strife : they see 
A happy youth, and their old age 

Is beautiful and free. 

The former part of the description is unquestionable, 
but the latter may be doubted. We know little of 
the closing days of birds — what they suffer or regret. 
One fact alone is ascertained ; that their existence is 
short, in proportion to what I may venture td call 
their mental influences. The calm swan sails into his 
third century, and the emulative nightingale warbles 
away its sweet life, before it has seen its sixteenth 
summer. As to the happiness of old age among the 
feathered tribe, nothing can be told, because nothing 
is known. The bird in the cage evidently feels the 
burden of years, and often becomes dependent on 
friendly hands for assistance in his infirmities. Why 
should the patriarch of the trees escape the trials of 

9* 



202 JOURNAL OF 



his brotlier in confinement? Affection seldom sur- 
vives the nest. A story is told of a thrush feeding a 
captive blackbird for ten days with tender assiduity. 
But an occasional example proves no rule. The whole 
subject of bird-manners and customs is full of lively 
and enduring interest. How much may the little mu- 
sician, among the apple-bloom, know and feel in com- 
mon with sad and thoughtful minds — with Falkland 
or Bishop Jewell ? 

The mere circumstance that a bird dreams is a 
link that fastens it to man. Beckstein mentions a 
bullfinch, which frequently fell from its perch in the 
terror of sleep, and became immediately tranquil and 
reassured by the voice of its mistress. 

Birds may engage a man's study as well as him- 
self. They enjoy some of his best and brightest emo- 
tions. They are loving and faithful. Their memory 
is quick and lasting. Old trees, shadowy eaves, and 
blossomy hedges, are known and revisited year after 
year. Who can tell the rush of sorrow into the mind 
of the nightingale, landed from a Syrian garden about 
the 12th of April, and suspended in a parlour-nook 
on the following evening ! Its eye has a painful ca- 
pacity of showing affliction — the iris becomes con- 
tracted. And if birds have some of our feelings, they 
have more than our ingenuity. Not to mention their 
architecture and educational economy, they know the 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 203 

hour of the day without clocks. The goat-sucker, or 
churn-owl, begins its lonely song at sunset ; he never 
loses a minute ; so that in a village where, in still 
weather, the Portsmouth evening gun is often heard, 
the boom and the note intermingle. If a signal were 
given, the two sounds could not be more even. 

August 1st. — Mr. Rogers is reported to have ex- 
pressed astonishment that Prior is not more read. 
But the poet outlawed himself Johnson's theory 
about his fitness for a lady's table will now find very 
few advocates. I wish it were otherwise. Some of 
his serious verses are marked by great beauty and 
elegance. Take these, to Bishop Sherlock : — 

No more with fruitless care and cheated strife, 
Chase fleeting pleasure through the maze of life. 

O save us still, still bless us with thy stay ; 

want thy heaven, till we have learnt the way. 

His Solomon, though rough, and deficient in variety 
of interest, is sown with thoughts and images of pen- 
sive grace, that dwell on the memory :- 

Yex'd with the present moment's heavy gloom, 
Why seek we brightness from the years to come ? 
Disturbed and broken, like a sick man's sleep, 
Our troubled thoughts to distant prospects leap, 



204 JOURNAL OF 



Desirous still wliat flies lis to o'ertake ; 

For hope is but the dream of those that wake. 

The last line is scarcely excelled by Pope's descrip- 
tion of 

— faith our early immortality. 

The thought is of Greek origin. I am indebted 
for an acquaintance with it to a critic of this Journal 
upon its first appearance. In 1696. a translated life 
of Aristotle was published, containing, among other 
sayings of the Philosopher, the remarkable senti- 
ment — " Hope is the dream of one that awaketh :" 
and Prior was in the habit of borrowing illustrations 
from obscure books. 

But the strength of Prior lay in his pleasant nar- 
rative and sparkling fictions ; there he was a master. 
One of his warmest admirers in this style was the 
author of John Gilpin : '* What suggested to Johnson 
the thought that the 'Alma' was written in imitation 
of 'Hudibras,' I cannot conceive. In former years, 
they were both favourites of mine, and I often read 
them ; but I never saw in them the least resemblance 
to each other, nor do I now, except that they are com- 
posed in verse of the same measure." Cowper's criti- 
cism is scarcely correct. Butler was evidently the 
model of Prior. The difference is that of tempera- 
ment. The earlier poet seeming to compose with the 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 



205 



toil of thoughtful scholarship ; the later, with the ease 
and enjoyment of a quick and sportive fancy. Hudi- 
bras has a learned, ponderous look and sound ; Alma 
runs along with the clatter and jingle of good spirits. 
Groldsmith, who could not understand it, admitted 
parts to be very fine. 

We see in all the gayer efforts of Prior a neatness 
and economy of phrase, to which his contemporaries 
or successors have seldom attained. A comparison 
with Gray is the severest ordeal of criticism ; but in 
this stanza. Prior wins the crown. It is a curious in- 
stance of the vanity of all human genius, that the 
finer original should have been forgotten in the weaker 
imitation. The thought has become proverbial — a 
coin passed into the general currency : but the name 
of Prior is rubbed out : 



Prioe. 

If we see right, we see our 

woes: 
Then what avails it to have 

eyes ? 
From ignorance our comfort 

flows ; 
The only wretched are the 

wise, 



Gray. 

Yet, ah ! why should they 

know their fate. 
Since sorrow never comes too 

late. 
And happiness too swiftly 

flies? 
Thought would destroy their 

paradise. 
1^0 more ; where ignorance is 

bliss, 
'Tis folly to be wise. 



206 JOURNAL OF 



* Prior is numbered among the last of English 
rhymers who adorned heroines with Diana's quiver, or 
borrowed Mercury for a messenger. One does not 
see why the classic properties should have been aban- 
doned as useless. The fictions of mythology are so 
many elements of the picturesque. In this sense the 
greatest painters regarded them. It is absurd to 
talk of belief or reality. The Olympian people are 
like the old armour of Rembrandt, or the purple man- 
tle of Titian ; nothing more. I cannot agree with 
Johnson, that pagan machinery is uninteresting to us, 
or that a goddess in Yirgil makes us weary. Besides 
being a source of the decorative in poetry and art, 
Greek and Latin mythology filled up the want of do- 
mestic interest. In the ^Eneid, the mother of the 
hero sheds charms of womanhood over the adventures 
and perils of her son. She diffuses a sense of beauty, 
like summer-time. The reader never loses sight of 
Venus. Or, if she recede from the eye, the colouring 
bloom of her face and robe still flows along the narra- 
tive ; as the sunshine, sinking behind thick trees for 
a moment, leaves the grass warm with its recent 
splendour. 

August 2d. — Amusement is the waking sleep of 
labour. When it absorbs thought, patience, and 
strength, that might have been seriously employed, it 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTPv,Y. 



207 



loses its distinctive character, and becomes the task- 
work of idleness. For this reason, an elegant occupa- 
tion of leisure hours may be very questionable to a 
Christian mind, keeping a debtor-and-creditor account 
of time. In any case, the opinions of the Bishop 
and Poet are worth hearing : — 



CHESS. 

BISHOP BEVERIDGE. 

Either 'tis a lottery or not. If 
it be a lottery, it is not law- 
ful ; because 'tis a great pre- 
sumption and sin to set God 
at work to recreate ourselves. 
If it be not a lottery, then it 
is not a pure recreation; for 
if it depends on man's wit and 
study, it exercises his brain 
and spirits as if he was about 
other things. So that being 
on one side not lawful — on 
the other side no recreation, 
it can on no side be lawful. — 
Private Thoughts. 



CHESS. 

WILLIAM COWPER. 

Who, then, that has a mind 
well strung and tuned 

To contemplation, and within 
his reach 

A scene so friendly to his 

fav'rite taste, 
Would waste attention on the 

chequer'd board. 
His host of wooden warriors 

to and fro 
Marching and counter-march- 
ing, with an eye 
As fix'd as marble, with a 

forehead ridg'd 
And furrowed into storms, 

and with a hand 
Trembling as if eternity were 

hung 
In balance on his conduct of 

a pin. 

Task, B. i. 



208 JOURNAL OF 



August 3rd. — If a student ever begin to plume 
himself on his reading in the week, let him take up a 
volume of Warburton, and learn to know his own 
poverty. The remedy will be pungent, but effectual. 
This remarkable man has been painted by four pen- 
cils — Bolingbroke, Johnson, Hurd, and Parr. The 
outline by Pope's friend is like a rough study in chalk 
for one of Rembrandt's heads : — " The man was com- 
municative enough, but there was nothing distinct in 
his mind. To ask him a question, was to wind up a 
spring in his memory that rolled in vast rapidity and 
with a confused noise, till the force of it was spent, 
and you went away with all the noise in your ears, 
stunned and uninformed." 

The judgment of Johnson was not much milder : 
— " If I had written with hostility of Warburton in 
my Shakspere, I should have quoted this couplet : — 

Here learning, blinded first and then beguiled, 
Looked dark as Ignorance, as Fancy wild. 

You see they'd have fitted him to a T." Dr. Adams. 
— " But you did not write against Warburton." 
Johnson. — " No, Sir, I treated him with great respect, 
both in my preface and notes." 

Warburton regarded his contemporary's behaviour 
in a darker light. Hints of wounded authorship 
break out in his letters : — '' The remarks he makes in 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 209 

every page on my commentaries are full of insolence 
and malignant reflections, &c." And, again, to Hurd: 
— " Of this Johnson, you and I, I believe, think pret- 
ty much alike." 

The giants once met at the house of the Bishop 
of St. Asaph. Warburton looked on Johnson, at 
first, with some surliness ; but after being jostled into 
conversation, they retired to a window, and in taking 
leave Warburton patted his companion. They ought 
to have taken to each other, having so many good and 
evil qualities in common. Both of humble parentage 
and lifted over the crowd into comfort and fame ; 
both despots, and reigning by terror ; both impetuous 
and coarse ; both familiar with broadest and narrow- 
est paths of literature ; Warburton knowing most of 
philosophy and Greek ; Johnson of poetry and polite 
learning. Neither was richly endowed with taste, 
whatever Pope might choose to affirm of his advo- 
cate. But Johnson, even with Lycidas scowling in 
his face, had the larger share. Warburton tumbled 
everything into his vast heaps of erudition. That 
flame of genius must have been strong which shot up 
through the rubbish and dust. And it did ascend. 
The fire is never stifled. The Legation may be a 
paradox, but it blazes. The style, in the highest de- 
gree nervous and animated, abounds in sallies of 
mirth, happinesses of phrase, glowing outbursts of 



210 JOURNAL OF 



feeling, and curiosities of abuse. His sarcasm has 
the keenest edge : — " The learned and judicious Mr. 
Huet, whOj not content to seize as lawful prize all he 
meets with in the waste of fabulous times, makes 
cruel inroads into the cultivated ages of literature." — 
(D. L., b. iii. sect. 6.) 

I recollect an amusing anecdote of Warburton, in 
a letter of Mrs. Carter (1763) to Miss Talbot. The 
scene was a stage-coach between Deal and London : — 
" As Nancy might possibly give you a formidable ac- 
count of my three fellow-travellers, I think it necessary 
to inform you that they did not eat me up ; for which 
I was the more obliged to them, as they seemed dis- 
posed to eat everything else that came in their way. 
By their discourse I believe they were pilots to thg 
packet-boats. One of them, in great simplicity, gave 
a very concise account of one of his passengers. He 
said he had once carried over one Warburton, a very 
old orator, — you may read about him in the almanacks. 
He was a member of parliament then, but he has been 
made a bishop since. Poor Bishop Warburton, to 
have all his fame reduced to what one may read about 
him in the almanacks ! " 

August 4th. — A painter may sit before a glass 
and draw himself, but the mental portrait must be 
taken by other hands. Every man is his own de- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 211 

ceiver. " I will not give the algebraist sixpence for 
his encomiums on my Task, if he condemns my Homer, 
which I know in point of language is equal to it, and 
in variety of numbers superior." The self-love of 
Milton was not weaker than Cowper's. A preference 
of Paradise Lost to Regained, made him angry. 
When Johnson was requested to name the finest 
couplet he had ever written, he repeated the two most 
pompous verses in his works. Tasso was willing to 
let the Jerusalemme be estimated by its weakest 
stanza. The mistake of Milton and Cowper in a 
literary, other authors have made in a moral or per- 
sonal sense. 

•' What has this book," exclaims Sterne of Tris- 
tram, " done more than the Legation of Moses, that 
it may not swim down the gutter of time along with 
it ! " " Methinks, when I write to you," says Pope to 
Congreve, " I am writing a confession. I have got 
(I cannot tell how) such a custom of throwing myself 
out upon paper without reserve." The last time Dr. 
Warton saw Young, he was censuring the inflated 
style of poetry. He said that such tumultuous writers 
reminded him of a passage in Milton : — 

Others, with vast Typhaean rage more fell, 
Rend up both rocks and hills, and ride the air 
In whirlwinds. 



212 JOURNAL OF 



And yet Sterne must have known that his book was 
steeped in corruption ; Pope, that even his commonest 
notes of invitation were artificial ; and Young, that a 
swelling extravagance of phrase was the besetting sin 
of his genius. 

We have an amusing instance of this self-blindness 
in Hogarth. Talking to a visitor about his favourite 
line of beauty, he affirmed that no man who really un- 
derstood it could, by any accident, be ungraceful in 
his manners. '* I myself," he added, " from my per 
feet knowledge of it, should not hesitate as to the 
becoming mode of offering anything to the greatest 
monarch." And at the very moment when he was 
enlarging upon the advantages of being familiar with 
the line of beauty, his own attitude was so unspeak- 
ably ridiculous, that his friend struggled, almost in 
vain, to refrain from laughter. These examples are so 
many calls to reflection, self-examination, and know- 
ledge. After the Bible, a man ought to make himself 
his chief reading. He must not skip a hard page^ 
but work out the meaning. 

August 5th. — Taking up again the thread of 
poetical imitations which I began to unwind the other 
day, I notice a very pleasing description by Aaron 
Hill, which, in one or two lines, is even tenderer than 
the Pleasures of Memory. Southey commends him 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 



213 



as deserving respect for his talents and virtues, and 
" holding the first place for liberality and beneficence 
among the literary men of his country." He brought 
a blush into the cheek of Pope. His versification is 
often musical and swelling — as upon a lady at her 
spinnet — 

Fearless with face oblique, her formal hand 
Plunges, with bold neglect, amid the keys, 
And sweeps the sounding range with magic ease. 

But the lines, " Alone in an Inn at Southampton, 
April 25, 1737," furnish the most favourable evidence 
of his talents : — 



Aaron Hill. 

Pensive and cold this room in 

each changed part, 
I view, and shocked, from 

every object start. 
There hung the watch, that, 

beating hours from day. 
Told its sweet owner's lessen- 
ing life away ; 
There her dear diamond taught 

the sash my name ; 
'Tis gone ! frail image of love, 

life, and fame. 
That glass she dress' d at keeps 

her form no more ; 



Rogers. 

As o^er the dusky furniture I 

bend, 
Each chair awakes the feeling 

of a friend; 
The storied arras, source of 

fond delight, 
"With old achievement charms 

the wilder'd sight ; 
The screen unfolds its many- 

colour'd chart, 
The clock still points its moral 

to the heart. 
That faithful monitor 'twas 

heaven to hear, 



214 



JOURNAL OP 



Aaron Hill. 

Not one dear footstep tunes 
th' unconscious floor. 

There sat she, — yet those chairs 
no sense retain, 

And busj recollection starts 
in vain. 

Sullen and dim, what faded 
scenes are here ! 

I wonder, and retract a start- 
ing tear ; 

Gaze in attentive doubt, with 
anguish swell, 

And o'er and o'er on each 
weigh'd object dwell ; 

Then to the window rush, gay 
views invite, 

And tempt idea to permit 

. delight; 

But unimpressive — all in sor- 
row drown' d, 

One void forgetful desert 
blooms around. 



KOGERS. 

When soft it spoke a promised 

pleasure near ; 
And has its sober hand, its 

simple chime. 
Forgot to trace the feather'd 

feet of Time? 
That massive beam with cu- 
rious carvings wrought. 
Where the caged linnet 

soothed m J pensive thought ; 
Those muskets, cased with 

venerable rust; 
Those once-loved forms still 

breathing through their 

dust, 
Still from the frame in mould 

gigantic cast. 
Starting to life, — all whisper 

of the Past. 



\ 

The watch ticking in his wife's sickness, and the glass 

that no longer retained her image, seem to me cir- 
cumstances of affectionate grief most touchingly con- 
ceived. 

The more we read, the more the original stock of 
thought dwindles. The famous description, in the 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 215 

Essay on Criticism , of the intermediate heights of 
literature ascending before the eyes of the climbing 
pilgrim, which Johnson praised as the most apt, sub- 
lime, and proper simile in the English language, has 
been shown by Warton to be copied, almost literally, 
from Drummond. The outline having been traced 
over the glass of memory, the artist laid on the 
colouring. 

Pope sought for pearls in some of the prose wri- 
ters of the seventeenth century, who, in his day, were 
known to few scholars, and scarcely read by any. In 
them he found many of those brilliant sayings and 
axioms of moral wisdom, which, polished by taste and 
sharpened by skill, present such rows of glittering 
points in his verse. The ingenious designation of one 
year — 

— a reservoir to keep and spare ; 
The next a fountain spouting through his heir, 

has been traced to the Church History of Fuller. 
The same witty and eloquent writer asks, with refer- 
ence to the contemptuous neglect with which false and 
scandalous rumours should be regarded, " What mad- 
ness were it to plant a piece of ordnance to heat 
down an aspen leafP^ Pope, in his satire upon 
Lord Hervey, has the vivacious and cutting interro- 
gation — 



216 JOURNAL OF 



Who breaks a butterfly upon the wheel ? 

Fuller says, that Monica, the mother of Augus- 
tine, " saw a glimpse of happiness through the chinks 
of her sickness-broken body." Waller, describing the 
calmness of the mind wben the storms of youth and 
manhood have subsided, introduces the same image 
into his celebrated lines : — 

The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decayed, 

Lets in new light, through chinks which time has made. 

While speaking of these resemblances of thought, 
I may notice a curious coincidence between Dryden 
and Lord Bacon. Dryden says of a satirist — 

He makes his desperate passes with a smile. 

Lord Bacon remarks of controversial writers upon 
subjects connected with the church — ^' To search and 
rip up wounds with a laughing countenance!''^ 

Tickell wrote a poem on the death of Addison : 
popular and pleasing it is. Goldsmith called it the 
finest elegy in the language ; Johnson indirectly pre- 
ferred it to Milton's pastoral dirge. Of course, the 
two Doctors were equally wrong; I only mean to 
refer to the saying of Steele, that the poem is jprose 
in rhyme. He was literally correct without knowing 
it. Read the famous couplet — 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 217 

He taught us how to live, and (oh ! too high 
The price for knowledge) taught us how to die ; 

and tlien turn to the fifth book of Hooker's Polity. 
He is treating of the prayer in the Litany against 
sudden death ; and argues that the Christian ought 
to desire a dismissal like that of Moses, or Jacob, or 
Joshua, or David— a peaceful, leisurely termination 
of life, so as to comfort those whom he leaves behind, 
by filling their hearts with faith and hope ; '-'-and^ to 
sum up all^ to teach the world no less virtuously how 
to die^ than they had done before how to liveP Here 
is TickelPs golden rhyme in its native bed of prose. 
However, in poetry, as in nature, everything is double. 
If Tickell borrows, he also lends. His Ode on the 
Prospect of Peace, which obtained the warm praise of 
Addison, contains the outline of Groldsmith's lively 
portrait of the returning soldier : — 



TlCKELLo 

Near the full howl he draws the 
fancied line, 

And makes feigrC d trenches in 
the flowing wine ; 

Then sets the invested fort be- 
fore her eyes, 

And mines that whirl'd bat- 
talions to the skies. 
10 



Goldsmith. 

The broken soldier, kindly 

bade to stay, 
Sat by his fire, and talk'd the 

night away. 
Wept o'er his wounds^ or tales 

of sorrow done^ 
Shouldered his crutch and 

showed how fields were won. 



218 JOURNAL OF 



August 6th. — Sir George Beaumont said one day 
to Constable — " Do you not find it difficult to place your 
brown tree V '' Not in the least," was the answer, 
" for I never put such a thing in a picture !" On an- 
other occasion the accomplished critic recommended 
the colour of an old violin for the prevailing tint of a 
landscape. Constable replied by laying one upon the 
lawn before the house. This morning I have amused 
myself with looking at our home scenery, with refer- 
ence to the rival theories ; and certainly, at the first 
glance, I saw nothing of the Cremona in tree, field, 
or lane. The white beech, stained over with faint, 
silvery green, is unlike the trunk of Hobbema or 
Both. But it might have stood to Constable for its 
portrait. 

I think the apparent contradiction may be ex- 
plained. The colour of trees and grass depends 
chiefly on the light and distance in which they are 
viewed. Walk up to an elm, and mark the sunshine 
running along its sides, and afterwards retire to the 
end of the glade and look back ; the bright tint will 
be sobered into a shadowy gloom, altogether different. 
The same change may be observed in the openings of 
a wood; and accordingly a poet, who has the true 
painter's eye, describes — 

The mossy pales that skirt the orchard green, 
Here hid by shrub wood, there by glimpses seen ; 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 219 



And the brown pathway, that luith careless flow, 
Sinks, and is lost among the trees below. 

Wilkie says of one of Titian's famous landscapes, 
" The whites are yellow, the blue sky is green, and the 
green trees are the deepest brown. I have seen Os- 
tade often on this scale ; and if successful effect con- 
stitutes authority, how practically terrible is the tone 
of this great work ; but how removed from the prac- 
tice of modern times !" 

Clever, scoffing Matthews (the " Invalid") used 
to declare that Gr. Poussin's green landscapes had no 
charms for him, and that the delightful verdurous tint 
of nature could not be transferred by the pencil. 
The great masters took their colours from autumn, 
breathing a mellow shade of ideal hues over the 
whole. As Sir Gr. Beaumont observed of Rem- 
brandt, they nourished the picture with warmth. 

Titian produced compositions ; Constable copies. 
Not a spot of moss escapes him. I remember a 
striking illustration of his faithfulness : — " A cottage 
is closely surrounded by a corn-field, which, on the 
side sheltered from the heat of the sun, continues to 
be green, while the other parts are ripening into the 
golden colour. This truth of representation drew 
from an admirer the exclamation — " How fresh, how 
dewy, how exhilarating !" Of the elder painters, Al- 
bano alone preserved the green of his trees, though 



220 SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 

he touched them with a soft light of poetry unknown 
and unfelt by the English artist. The merit of Con- 
stable is in some degree that of Cowper. The middle 
tints of Claude, or the transparent distances of Ru- 
bens, were equally beyond his taste and capacity. 
He is pleasing, because he is true. Compare his trees 
with those of Watteau, of which the grotesqueness 
was a puzzle to Walpole, until he recognised them in 
the trimmed branches of the Tuileries. 

An amusing page might be written on the favour- 
ite trees of landscape painters. Gr. Poussin was par- 
tial to the thin-leaved acacia ; Ruysdael to the broad 
oak ; Claude to the elm and stone pine ; Rubens to 
the stumpy pollard ; Salvator Rosa delighted in the 
chestnut. It flourished in the Calaljrian mountains, 
where he studied it in all its forms ; breaking and 
disposing it, as Gilpin says, in a thousand beautiful 
shapes, as the exigencies of his composition required. 
Perhaps its brittleness, which causes it to be often 
shattered by storms, recommended it still more to his 
picturesque eye. 

Claude and Rubens may be regarded as the two 
types of landscape art. Standing between their pic- 
tures, we are led to compare the first to an Idyl of 
Theocritus ; the second, to a splendid grouping of 
Thomson. The former is all grace and sameness ; 
the latter is all variety and brightness. In the Ital- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 221 

ian master, the fine sense of truthfulness is conspicuous. 
Not only the season, but the temperature and hour 
are defined. We feel warm in his summer noon, and 
draw our cloak round us in the cool air of autumn 
evenings. The history of Claude furnishes another 
example of the opposition and contradictions of 
Taste. Of his figures, Wilson said — " Do not fall 
into the common mistake of objecting to Claude's fig- 
ures :" and Gilpin lamented that the same pencil — 

Oft crowded scenes which nature's self might own. 
With forms ill drawn, ill chosen, ill arrang'd, 
Of man and beast, o'er-loading with false taste 
His sylvan glories. 

Hazlitt observed of Rubens, that he carries some one 
quality or aspect of nature to the extreme verge of 
probability. In other words, his works are always 
picturesque — i. e. composed with reference to the eye 
and its sensations. In a picture at St. Petersburgh. 
the rose-tints of evening, and the silver rays of the 
rising moon are strangely, but sweetly, intermingled. 
Rubens makes that appearance to be Nature, which 
is only one ol her accidents. I have seen the setting 
sun redden the wood, and the rainbow spanning the 
lake ; so that at one and the same instant of time, 
the elm-tree was sprinkled with gold, and the distant 
field swam in a melting glory. Rubens would have 



222 JOURNAL OF 



spread this dazzling confusion of light and shade over 
his canvas, and called it " Evening." Perhaps he 
might have drawn from it a lesson in allegory ; for 
like the poet of Faery Land, he is ever bending over 
the fountains of fancy : — 

His own warm blush within the water glows, 
"With him the coloured shadow comes and goes. 

Claude is, I believe, the only painter who has 
shown the beautiful effect of sunshine through trees 
upon water. Rubens endeavoured to copy the spots 
of light streaming among leaves ; but the embellish- 
ment belongs rather to poetry ; and Shakspere has 
applied it to the appearance of Truth breaking into 
the conscience ; as the sun — 

Fires the proud tops of the eastern pines, 
And darts his light through every guilty hole. 

Another charming accident of light — the chequer 
of sunbeams on the grass — when, 

Rolling their mazy network to and fro, 
Light shadows shift and play, 

is a favourite and pleasing decoration of landscape. 
Price remarks, that in extreme brilliancy of lights 
Rubens has no competitor ; sometimes they are un- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 223 

mixed with shade ; or they burst from dark clouds, 
darting over the picture, and producing what is called 
a flicker^ — very captivating, but scarcely imitable by 
a weaker hand. 

The same admirable critic cautions us against 
looking at the atmospheric delineations of Kubens 
with the mere English eye. He painted in Flanders, 
where the thick yellow clouds are permeated by the 
crimson fire of the sun. Accordingly, he gives us his 
own nature ; and wonderful it is. What air ! — how 
thin, impalpable ! Only Teniers might equal it. In 
the " Going to Market," at Windsor, the road that 
leads to the Flemish town appears to wind away il- 
limitably — to die in space. And then the glow and 
shadow ! 

The peculiar beauties in the style and handling of 
Rubens have been skilfully woven together in a poem 
by Mr. Bowles — when this Journal appeared two 
years ago, the oldest of our living poets, but now 
gathered into his Master's granary. Much of interest 
is folded up in the history of his life ; inspiring Cole- 
ridge, cheering Southey, and enjoying the friendship 
of Crabbe. I have his last poem — " St. John in Pat- 
mos" — enriched by his own corrections. But to re- 
turn to Rubens. The picture which Mr. Bowles has 
illustrated now hangs in our National Grallery : — 



224 JOURNAL OF 



Fa J, let ITS gaze, eyen till the sense is full, 
Upon the rich creation, shadowed so 
That not great nature in her loftiest pomp 
Of Hying beauty, eyer on the sight 
Rose more magnificent, nor aught so fair 
Hath fancy in her wild and sweetest mood 
Imaged of things most loyelj, when the sounds 
Of this cold cloudy world at distance sink. 
And all alone the warm idea liyes, 
Of what is great, or beautiful, or good, 
In nature's general plan. 

Such the yast scope, 
Oh, Rubens I of thy mighty mind, and such 
The feryour of thy pencil pouring wide 
The still illumination, that the mind 
Pauses, absorb' d, and scarcely thinks what powei^ 
Of mortal art the sweet enchantment wrought. 
She sees the painter with no human touch, 
Create, embellish, animate at will. 
The mimic scenes from nature's ampler range. 
Caught, as by inspiration, while the clouds, 
High-wand'ring, and the fairest form of things 
Seem at his bidding to emerge, and burn 
With radiance, and with life. 

Let us subdued 
Now to the magic of the moment, lose 
The thoughts of life, and mingle eyery sense, 
Eyen in the scenes before us. 

The fresh morn 
Of summer shines ; the white clouds of the east 
Are crisped ; beneath the bluey champaign steams, 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 225 

The banks, the meadows, and the flowers send up 
An increased exhalation. 

Mark again the various view — 
Some city's far off spires, and domes appear, 
Breaking the long horizon where the morn 
Sits blue and soft ; what glowing imagery 
Is spread beneath! Towns, villages, light smoke, 
And scarce-seen wind-mill sails, and devious woods, 
Check'ring 'mid sunshine the grass-level land, 
That stretches from the sight. 

Now nearer trace 
The form of trees distinct, the broad brown oak, 
The poplars that with silvery trunks incline, 
Shading the lonely castle ; flakes of light 
Are flung behind the massive groups, that now, 
Enlarging and enlarging still, unfold 
Their separate beauties — But awhile delay-— 
Pass the foot-bridge, and listen (for we hear, 
Or think we hear her) listen to the song 
Of yonder milk-maid, as she brims her pail, 
Whilst in the yellow pasture, pensive near, 
The red cows ruminate. 

"Break off"— break off," for lo! where all alarm'd 
The small birds, from their late resounding porch, ^p 
Fly various, hush'd their early song ; and mark. 
Beneath the darkness of the bramble bank 
That overhangs the half-seen brook, where nod 
The flow'ring rushes, dew-besprent; with breast 
Ruddy, and emerald wing, the king-fisher 
Steals through the dripping sedge away ; what shape 
Of terror scares the woodland habitants, 
10* 



226 JOURNAL OF 



Marring the music of the dawn ? Look round 
See, where he creeps beneath the willow stump, 
Cow'ring, and low, step silent after step, 
The booted fowler; keen his look, and fixt 
Upon the adverse bank, while with firm hand 
He grasps the deadly tube ; his dog, with ears 
Flung back, and still and steady eye of fire. 
Points to the prey; the boor intent moves on, 
Panting, and creeping, close beneath the leaves, 
And fears lest even the rustling reeds betray 
His footfall ; nearer yet, and yet more near 
He stalks ! — Ah, who shall save the heedless group ? 
The speckled partridges that in the sun. 
On yonder hillock green, across the stream, 
Bask unalarm'd beneath the hawthorn bush, 
Whose aged boughs the crawling blackberry 
Entwines. 

The country Kate, with shining morning cheek, 
(Who in the tumbril with her market gear 
Sits seated high,) seems to expect the flash 
Exploding — 

Not so the clown, who, heedless whether life 
Or death betide, across the splashing ford 
Drives slow : the beasts plod on, foot follows foot. 
Aged and grave, with half-erected ears. 
As now his whip above their matted manes 
Hangs trem'lous, while the dark and shallow stream 
Flashes beneath their fetlock ; he, astride 
On harness saddle, not a sidelong look 
Deigns at the breathing landscape, or the maid 
Smiling behind ; the cold and lifeless calf 
Her sole companion 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 227 

But lift the eje, 
And hail th' abode of rural ease. The man 
Walks forth from yonder antique hall, that looks 
The mistress of the scene : its turrets gleam 
Amid the trees, and cheerful smoke is seen 

On the balustrade 
Of the old bridge, that o'er the moat is thrown, 
The fisher with his angle leans intent, 
And turns from the bright pomp of spreading plains, 
To watch the nimble fry, that glancing oft, 
Beneath the grey arch shoot. 

Lo ! where the morning light, through the dark wood, 
Upon the window pane is flung like fire. 
Hail *' Life and Hope ! " and thou, great work of art, 
That mid this populous and busy swarm 
Of man, dost smile serene, as with the hues 
Of fairest, grandest nature, mayst thou speak 
Not vainly of th' endearments and best joys 
That nature yields. The manliest head that swells 
"With honest English feelings, — 
Charm'd for a moment by this mantling view, 
Its anxious tumults shall suspend. 

Chiefly thou, 
Great Rubens, shalt the willing senses lead. 
Enamoured of the varied imagery, 
That fills the vivid canvas, swelling full 
On the enraptured eye of taste, and still 
ISTew charms unfolding ; though minute, yet grand, 
Simple, yet most luxuriant — every light 
And every shade greatly opposed, and all 
Subserving to one magical efi^ect 
Of truth and harmony. 



238 JOURNAL OF 



So glows the scene ; 
And to the pensive thought refined displays 
The richest rural poem. 

August 7tli. — I find Orrery's letters on Swift 
very amusing. He is an earlier Boswell, without his 
dramatic power. The apprenticeship of both was 
severe. He assured Warburton that his pursuit of 
the Dean had been attended by numberless mortifica- 
tions. However, he had his reward. The entire im- 
pression of his letters was sold in a single day ; and 
Warburton mentions, in his correspondence with 
Hurd, that the publisher had disposed of twelve thou- 
sand copies. It would be very amusing to run over 
the animadversions on these letters, written in the 
margin of the copy in Hartlebury Library. The con- 
tinuation of Rousseau's Memoirs obtained a welcome 
of equal fervour in Paris, and faded from the public 
mind with equal rapidity. " In eight days," said La 
Harpe, " all the world had read them, and in eight 
days all the world had forgotten them." Swift's Ad- 
ventures of Gulliver were out of print in a week. 

Occasionally, but after long intervals of neglect, 
the tide of enthusiasm has hurried productions of 
learning and research into notice. The first volume 
of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman empire 
was not to be obtained in a few days after its appear- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 289 

ance; the succeeding impressions scattered it over 
" almost every toilet." Yet to mark the uncertainty 
of popular applause, Hume's History of England, 
which he commenced with the most sanguine expecta- 
tions, lay unnoticed on the shelf of the bookseller. 
In twelve months, Millar sold only forty-five copies. 
Atterbury expressed his " fixed opinion" that the re- 
putation of all books, perfectly well written, proceeds 
originally from the few. The exquisite tragedy of 
Athalie — the pride of the French drama — which 
awoke the admiration of Boileau and the tears of 
Voltaire, — was received with ridicule and contempt. 
The perusal of a given number of lines from it was one 
of the punishments inflicted upon fashionable offend- 
ers, in the distinguished circles of Paris. The most 
excellent comedy of Ben Jonson met with a fate 
scarcely less discouraging. 

Johnson entertained a more favourable opinion of 
Orrery's conduct than Warburton has expressed. 
When he was asked, whether he did not regard it as 
unjust to expose the failings of one with whom we may 
have lived in habits of intimacy, his reply was, 
" Why, no, sir ; after the man is dead ; for then it is 
done historically." Swift spoke kindly of Orrery ; he 
styles him, in a letter to Pope, a most worthy gentle- 
man. 



230 JOURNAL OF 



August 8tli. — Most literary stories seem to be 
shadows, brighter or fainter, of others told before. I 
came upon an example this morning, Mr. Nichols, 
the intimate companion and correspondent of Grray, 
was not more than nineteen years old, when a friend 
procured for him an introduction to the poet. Gray, 
pleased with his manner and conversation, invited him 
to his rooms, and cultivated his acquaintance. There 
is something graphic in the incident as related by 
Mathias. The conversation having taken a classical 
turn, Nichols ventured to offer a remark, and to illus- 
trate it by a quotation from Dante. " At the name of 
Dante, Mr. Gray suddenly turned round to him, and 
said, ' Right ; but have you read Dante, sir *? ' '.I 
have endeavoured to understand him,' was the apt 
reply of Nichols." 

I hope there is nothing apocryphal in the anec- 
dote ; but one strongly resembling it is related of 
Dryden. He was seated in his arm-chair at Will's, 
indulging in some commendation of his recently pub- 
lished Mac Flecknoe ; he added that he valued him- 
self the more upon it, because it was the first piece 
of ridicule written in heroics. There happened to 
be listening in a corner of the room, an odd-looking 
boy, with short, rough hair, who mustered up suffi- 
cient hardihood to mutter that the poem was a very 
good one, but that he had not supposed it to have 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 231 

been the first ever written in that manner. Dryden, 
turning briskly on his critic, with a smile, said, 
" Pray, sir, what is it that you did imagine to have 
been writ before ? '' " Boileau's Lutrin, and Tassoni's 
Secchia Rapita," was the answer. Dryden acknow- 
ledged the truth of the correction, and desired the 
censor to call upon him the next day. The boy with 
the rough hair was Lockier, afterwards Dean of 
Peterborough, who continued to enjoy the poet's 
acquaintance until his death. Lockier's Italian chro- 
nology was somewhat at fault ; for Pulci introduced 
the burlesque before Tassoni. As to Mac Flecknoe, 
recent criticism has softened the censure of Johnson. 
In four hundred lines, Mr. Hallam finds not one 
weak or careless. It need not be said that Dryden 
is wanting in the graceful humour of Tassoni, and the 
exquisite polish of Boileau. His wit had more weight 
than edge. It beat in armour, but could not cut gauze. 
I ought to ask forgiveness of Boswell, or his shade, 
for comparing his biographical trials with those 
endured by Orrery, in his endeavours to smooth 
down the fretful Dean. What a dark, lowering face 
Onslow gives him ; — " Proud, insolent, void of all 
decency, offensive to his friends, almost as much as 
to his enemies ; hating all men, and even human na- 
ture itself; wanting to be a tyrant to gratify his 
ambition and disdain of the world." It might be 



232 JOURNAL OF 



instructive to draw a parallel between Swift and 
Sterne, as reflected in Gulliver and Tristram. In 
both we should find the same grotesque images, the 
same explosions of laughter, the same vividness of 
delineation, the same deep, jagged gashes into human 
nature, and the same passion for all that is degraded 
and revolting. Every disease of the soul has a 
clinical description. Each book of Swift is 

A case of skeletons well done, 
And malefactors every one. 

Both possessed genius ; but genius blasted with fire, 
and exiled from the pure heaven of imagination. 
Sterne had one softening quality of intellect, un- 
shared by the Dean — the power of moving the heart. 
Our conviction of the hypocrisy of his pathos is the 
only check to its tyranny. Swift was the truer man, 
as Sterne was the more melo-dramatic. 

August 9th. — A story is told of an ancient 
painter, who threw a brush at a picture ; and another 
of Reynolds, who dipped it in cinder dust. Each 
produced the effect he desired. Again — Titian and 
Raffaelle did not employ costly colours, even in their 
oil-paintings, but chiefly earths and common colours. 
The experience and practice of great poets ar,e the 
same. — The bright image, that darted into the mind 
like a sunbeam ; or the phrase, so hazardously ven- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 233 

tured on, and so exquisitely significant, is the pencil 
hurled at the canvas, or rubbed in the cinders. 
Simple, every-day words, are the earths of the poet. 
The pen, not the pigmeilt, gives the life and charm. 
Mr. Harrison, in his interesting view of the English 
Language, points out the magnificent impression, in 
Milton's hand, of the single epithet — 

— all too httle seems 
To stuff his maw — ^this vast unhidehowid corpse. 

Death is portrayed as a monster, not confined within 
superficies, and, therefore, by nature insatiable ; a 
page would only have weakened the image. In poeti- 
cal landscapes, this representative faculty of a few 
syllables is very surprising ; as in the line of Beattie, 

And lake dim gleaming on the smoky lawn ; 

and more vividly still in the exquisite verses of 
Wordsworth :— - 

The grass is bright with rain-drops, — on the moors 

The hare is running races in her mirth, 

And with her feet she from the plashy earth 

Raises a 7nist ; that, glittering in the sun, 

Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run. 

In marine views, Crabbe carried the art to its 
utmost boundary: whether in the sketch of the 
oyster-dredger, 



234 



JOURNAL OF 



— cold and wet, and drivitig with the tide ; 

or of a low muddy shore. 

And higher up a ridge of all things base, 
Which some strong tide has roll'd upon the place. 

The shingle is hot beneath the feet, or moist to the 
handj as we turn up the wet shining stones to the sun. 
The lazy tide rakes its way back oyer the pebbles ; 
or the distant ship, the wind dying out of her sails, 
sinks to sleep on the sleeping sea ; or the breeze 
freshens, and then the waves begin to stir, — 

Their colours changing, when from clouds and sun 
Shades after shades upon the surface run. 

The four following specimens present picture-poet- 
ry in the most pleasing form : — 



SIGIs^S OF "WINTER. 

CRABBE^ 

When on the thorn the ripen- 
ing sloe, yet blue, 

Takes the bright varnish of 
the morning dew, 

The aged moss grows brittle 
on the pale, 

The dry boughs splinter in 
the windy gale. 



BEGINNING OF SPRING. 

BLOOMFIELD. 

Stopt in her song, perchance 

the starting thrush 
Shook a white shoiver from 

the black-thorn bush ; 
Where dew-drops thick as 

early blossoms hung, 
And trembled as the minstrel 

sweetly sung. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 



235 



RAIN ON A RIVER. 

KIRKE WHITE. 

And list, the rain-drops beat 

the leaves, 
Or smoke upon the cottage 

eaves ; 
Or silent dimpling on the 

stream 
Conmrt to lead its silver 

gleam. 



EVENING SHADOWS. 

COLLINS. 

And hamlets broivn, and dim- 
discovered spires : 
And hears their simple bell, 
and marks o'er all 
Thj dewy fingers draw 
The gradual dusky veil. 



Perhaps the one life-giving stroke of genius will 
be better appreciated after comparing a description 
by Thomson, with one by White :— 



CLOSE OF DAY. 

WHITE OF SELBORNE. 

When day, declining, sheds a 

milder gleam. 
What time the May-fly haunts 

the pool or stream ; 
When the still owl skims 

round the grassy mead, 
What time the timorous hare 

limps forth to feed. 
Then be the time to steal 

adown the vale, 
And listen to the vagrant 

cuckoo's tale ; 



CLOSE OF DAY. 

THOMSON. 

— sober evening takes 
Her wonted station in the 

middle air ; 
A thousand shadows at her 

beck. First this 
She sends on earth ; then that 

of deeper dye 
Steals soft behind ; and then 

a deeper still, 
In circle following circle, 

gathers round. 
— A fresher gale 



236 



JOURNAL OF 



THOMSON. 

Begins to wave the wood, and 

stir the stream, 
Sweeping with shadowy gust 

the field of corn ; 
While the quail clamours for 

his running mate, 
— A faint erroneous ray^ 
Glanced from the imperfect 

surfaces of things, 
Flings half the image on the 

straining eye ; 
While wavering woods, and 

villages, and streams, 
And rocks and mountain-tops 

that long retain'd 
The ascending gleam, are all 

one swimming scene, 
Uncertain if beheld. 



WHITE. 

To hear the clamorous curlew 
call his mate, 

Or the soft quail his tender 
pain relate. 

To mark the swift, in rapid 
giddy^wing S } 

Dash round the steeple, un- 
subdued of wing. 

While deepening shades ob- 
scure the face of day, 

To yonder bench, leaf-shel- 
tered, let us stray. 

Till blended objects fail the 
swimming sight ; 

And all the fading landscape 
sinks in night. 

To hear the drowsy dorr 
come brushing by 

With buzzing wing, or the 
shrill cricket cry; 

To see the feeding bat glance 
through the wood, 

While o'er the cliff th' awak- 
en'd churn- owl hung, 

Through the still gloom pro- 
tracts his chattering song ; 

When, high in air, and poised 
upon his wings. 

Unseen, the soft enamoured 
wood-lark sings. 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 237 

Mark the difference between the poet and the natu- 
ralist. 

August 11th. — A thought occurs to me, — com- 
forting, or discouraging, as the case may be — that no 
work of genius can produce the same effect upon a 
widely civilized and an ignorant age. Would any 
poet now be so out of proportion to his contempora- 
ries, as Chaucer was in England, or Dante in Italy, 
during the 14th century? What Madonna of Eaffa- 
elle awoke equal wonder in the people's mind with 
the Madonna of Cimabue, which all Florence followed 
to its home in the church of the Dominicans ; or 
what later face of the Virgin obtained the national 
consecration of Ugolino's, and drew crowds as to a 
shrine? Continual intercourse with men, one inch 
over the average, soon takes off the awfulness of the 
giant — an era of cleverness is the worst season for a 
grand intellect — the descent of an angel is most daz- 
zling through a cloud. 

August 12th. — I bring my journal to an end with 
the dying lights and bloom of summer-time. This is 
one of those soft lulling afternoons, when, in Thom- 
son's expressive line — 

— his sweetest beams 
The sun sheds equal o'er the meeken'd day. 



238 JOURNAL OF 



Not ttat the season has really begun to fade. I can- 
not yet say of Our Village : " How beautiful the lane 
is to-day, decorated with a thousand colours ! The 
brown road and the rich verdure that borders it, 
strewed with the pale yellow leaves of the elm, just 
beginning to fall; hedge-rows glowing with long 
wreaths of the bramble in every variety of purplish 
red ; and overhead the unchanged green of the fir, 
contrasting with the spotted sycamore, the tawny 
beech, and the dry leaves of the oak, which rustle as 
the light wind passes through them ; a few common 
hardy yellow flowers, (for yellow is the common col- 
our of flowers, whether wild or cultivated, as blue is 
the rare one ;) of many sorts, but almost of one tint, 
still blowing in spite of the season ; and ruddy ber- 
ries glowing through all. How very beautiful is the 
lane !" No ; several days, or even weeks, must glide 
away before that picture will be ours. But the gar- 
dens and wood begin to look pensive. 

While I speak, the shadowy gust has shaken a 
leaf into my hand. Grone at last ! It lived through 
the summer, and only died this afternoon. Some 
leaves of the same bough I found withered or broken 
off in the early spring, almost before the light foot of 
the linnet had made it tremble. Gradually unfolding 
their hidden verdure under the fostering rain and 
sun, they looked lovely But a change soon appeared 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 239 

in their texture. The vivid hue waxed pale ; the 
vigour declined ; the delicate tracery of artery and 
vein, by which the life-blood of the tree is circulated, 
was wasted and defaced; the leaves shrivelled up^ 
and, after fluttering to and fro upon the branch, were 
drifted into the path and trodden under foot. Why 
did these leaves wither and die? An insect, minute, 
almost imperceptible, had fastened upon them. Day 
after day, hour after hour, it clung with devouring 
appetite, slowly, but surely, extracting all the life and 
strength ; and so, while their leafy kindred waved joy- 
ously in the breath of May, and the balmy sun played 
upon them, the work of death was going on, and the 
leaves were falling from the bough. 

And if many of this sylvan family perish in the 
spring, surely some of the family of man die also ; 
not in the outer frame-work of limb and feature, but 
in the precious inward life of spiritual, intellectual 
being. The fireside of English homes and the foliage 
of the wood give the same warning. Through the 
slow developments of infancy and childhood the un- 
derstanding expands into verdure, beneath the ripen- 
ing influences of afi'ection. The eyes of the house- 
hold turn with lingering tenderness to the youngest 
leaf upon the tree. How often, how soon, a change 
is visible ! The sweet purity and freshness decline ; 
then the circulation of the spiritual blood is impeded. 



240 JOURNAL OF 



Whence comes the mournful alteration? Still the 
leaf of our woods is only an image of the leaf of our 
affection. It was an insect there ; it is an insect here. 
Some reptile passion, almost hidden from the eyes of 
love, has fastened upon the budding faculties of youth, 
and clings to them day by day with a deadly con- 
stancy of hunger. 

The leaves that summer spared, the autumn gales 
will scatter. Death must reign in the bright, silent 
woodlands. But the sight is beautiful. The leaf is 
not devoured by insects, or scorched by heat. 

The maple burns itself away. 

The tracery of the tree grows transparent, as if a 
light were shining through it. Doubtless the leaves 
rustled under the feet of Homer, in some fragrant 
Grecian wood, when he compared the history of men 
to the blooming and death of the bough. 

It is a solemn spectacle to behold a Christian- 
spirit, in the waning lustre of life, becoming lovelier 
every hour ; having a sublimer faith, a brighter hope, 
a kinder sympathy, a gentler resignation. How could 
Johnson with his treasures of wisdom, virtue, and 
experience, give utterance to the melancholy com- 
plaint : " Thus pass my days and nights in morbid 
weakness, in unseasonable sleepiness, in gloomy soli- 
tude, with unwelcome visitors or ungrateful exclu- 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 241 

sions, in variety of wretchedness !" Not thus ought 
the philosopher and saint to bid farewell to the living. 
Rather, like the autumn leaf, he glows into decay, and 
kindles into death. The sun of Paradise, already 
risen over his soul, burns through the delicate fibres 
of thought, feeling, and desire ; making every word 
and deed beautiful beyond utterance, in the radiancy 
of truth, hope, and peace. 

But in this wood some leaves never brighten ; they 
wither and fall without a tint of beauty. Wonderful 
prophet of Chios ! In thy blindness full of visions ! 
The leaf that I hold in my hand is still the emblem 
of my nature and race. Life has its shrivelled 
branches. What a picture Gray draws of one of 
these leaves — yellow, but not reddening — dropping 
from the tree with no flush of light or colour to cheer 
it ! "I have now every day before my eyes a woman 
of ninety, my aunt, who has for many years been 
gradually turning into chalk-stones. They are mak- 
ing their way out of both feet, and the surgeon comes 
twice a day to increase the torture. She is just as 
sensible and as impatient of pain as she ever was sixty 
years go." No flame of the leaf is here, but a cold win- 
try parching up of verdure and health. How difierent 
from the spectacle that sometimes charms and awes 
us ; when the natural harshness of the tree has been 
11 



242 JOURNAL OF 



gradually worn out by the painful husbandry of suffer 
ingj and the root of selfishness yields the fruit of love. 

This leaf says to me something more. Its use- 
fulness does not end with its life. When I cast it on 
the ground, it will not be lost. It enriches the soil. 
Autumn feeds spring. The withered leaves help to 
bring forth the green. Here is my admonition. Min- 
utes are the leaves of life. The decay of one year is 
the foliage of the next. I have been deeply impressed 
by a late writer's sublime parable of a man shut up in 
a fortress, under sentence of perpetual imprisonment, 
and obliged to draw water from a reservoir which he 
may not see, but into which no fresh stream is ever to 
be poured. How much it contains he cannot tell. He 
knows the quantity is not great ; it may be extremely 
small. His imprisonment having been long, he has 
already drawn out a considerable supply. The dimi- 
nution increases daily ; and how, it is asked, " would 
he feel each time of drawing and each time of drink- 
ing it ?" Not as if he had a perennial spring to go 
to ; "I have a reservoir, I may be at ease." No ; " I 
had water yesterday, I have water to-day ; but my 
having had it yesterday and my having it to-day, is 
the very cause that I shall not have it on some day 
that is approaching." 

Surely this is a beautiful image, and true as beau- 
tiful. It is no violent metaphor to represent life as a 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 243 

fortress, and man a prisoner within its gate. Time is 
the dark Reservoir from which he drinks ; but he 
cannot descend to examine its depth or its quantity. 
He draws his supply from a fountain fed by invisible 
pipes. Nay, we do not often see the fountain. We 
conceal it with thick trees ; we strive to hide Time. 
Still, if we would linger by it for a moment, we might 
discover the various flow of the water at different sea- 
sons of the human year. In spring and summer — 
our childhood and early youth — the sunshine of hope 
silvers every drop ; and if we look into the stream, 
the voice of some fair spirit might almost be heard 
speaking to us from the crystal shrine. In autumn 
and winter days — -our mature manhood and old age — 
the fountain pours a languider and darker current. 
But the thing to be remembered, in spring, summer, 
autumn, and winter, is, that the Reservoir which feeds 
the fountain is being exhausted. Every drop that 
fell in our sunniest days lessened the water that re- 
mains. We had life yesterday^ and we have life to- 
day ; the probability, the certainty is, that we shall 
not have it on some day that is approaching. It 
strikes a chill to the heart to think, that the Reser- 
voir may not contain enough to supply the prisoner 
in life's dungeon for another week. 

But the shadow passes from the dial ; the evening 
glimmers away into the thick trees : — 



244 JOURNAL OF 



— Ah ! slowly sink 
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious sun ! 
Shine in the slant-beams of the sinking orb, 

Ye purple heath-flowers ! richlier burn, ye clouds ! 
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves. 

— I stand 
Silent with swimming sense, yea, gazing round 
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem 
Less gross than bodily ; and of such hues 
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when He makes 
Spirits perceive His presence. 

— a delight 
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad. 

— in this bower, 

This little lime-tree bower, have I not marked 

Much that has soothed me ? Pale, beneath the blaze, 

Hung the transparent foliage ; and I watch'd 

Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see 

The shadow of the leaf and stem above 

Dappling its sunshine ! and that walnut tree 

Was richly tinged, and a deep radiance lay 

Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps 

Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass» 

Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue 

Through the late twilight ; and though now the bat 

Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters, 

Yet still the solitary humble bee 

Sings in the night-flower. Henceforth I shall know 

That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure ; 

No plot so narrow, be but Nature there. 

No waste so vacant, but may well employ 



SUMMER TIME IN THE COUNTRY. 245 

Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart 
Awake to Love and Beauty. 

Then, welcome autumn, and golden sheaves, and har- 
vest-home ! " Do not talk of the decay of the year ; 
the season is good when the people are so. It is the 
best time of year for a painter." So wrote Pope. 
And if for a picture, surely for a life. The leaf that 
drops dim and flaccid from my hand has not been 
gathered up in vain. It reminds me of the greener 
country, where the leaves never fall, and the eternal 
day is Summer Time. 



THE END. 



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HOWAED THE PHILANTHEOPIST. 

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RECOLLECTIOlSrS OF A JOURNEY THROUGU 

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The Two Voices, or the Shadow and the Shadowless. The Minute Fairien 
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